The first person I meet when searching for Iain Banks’s North Queensferry home
is his next-door neighbour. “Be gentle with him,” instructs the man, who
appears to be in his seventies. This turns out to be Banks’s dad, Tom. Both
the novelist’s parents are alive and their devotion to their only child is
touching and reciprocated. Banks, 53, has a bad case of arrested
development. Last year he became so addicted to the computer game
Civilization, he lost three months.
The sense that Banks, who returned to live in his boyhood village in 1991, has
never quite grown up is reinforced when he tells me of his reaction to the
war in Iraq. “I put notices in the windows of my Land Rover which said:
‘Tony Bliar’ and ‘No blood for oil’ and just drove around Edinburgh,” he
says. “I planned to drive it into Waverley station, bump it on to the tracks
and stop all the trains. Then I thought I could crash it into the gates of
the nuclear dockyard in Rosyth. Then I remembered they had machine-guns.”
In the end he chopped up his passport and sent the bits to 10 Downing Street.
He hasn’t been able to travel abroad since March 20, 2003. It is a gesture
so funny, stupid, touching and futile that you want to shake and hug him
simultaneously. Anybody with a six-year-old child would recognise this as
the ultimate tantrum. Banks, who has no children, loftily describes it as
“direct action”.
He happily admits to putting much of himself into his characters. The
protagonists of his mainstream novels — he also writes science fiction under
the name Iain M Banks — are amoral, twentysomething, sex-obsessed men who
take copious quantities of drink and drugs with no long-term ill effects and
have tortuous relationships with women.
In this sense his new novel, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, does not
disappoint. Alban McGill is a twentysomething drop-out from the family
business who is the unwitting subject of a family secret and who is torn
between his affection for a funky mathematics professor and his cousin
Sophie. When a large, slick, American (for which read evil) corporation
attempts to buy the company, Alban fronts the opposition.
Banks is one of the few Scottish writers who combines the ability to win
serious literary plaudits with high volume sales. His dark debut novel, The
Wasp Factory, appeared at number 31 in Waterstone’s Top 100 Books of the
Century — just behind Nabokov’s Lolita, but ahead of Proust’s A la recherche
du temps perdu. It is cited by the photographer Rankin as the book that
changed his life.
The Steep Approach to Garbadale was written in the aftermath of a slow and
messy separation from his wife Annie and during the early throes of his new
relationship with Adele Hartley. Hartley, whom Banks describes as “into
genre”, is the founding director of the Edinburgh horror film festival Dead
By Dawn and curator of a new imprint of horror fiction. He first met her 17
years ago at a science-fiction convention, although they didn’t start dating
until last year.
The dedication in the new book is “for lost loves”. “That’s for Annie and
anybody else I might have hurt,” he says. But the poignancy is confined to
the flyleaf. There is a palpable sense of release in the novel, which
canters along at a fair pace, occasionally tripping over itself and
justifying the claim of those critics who argue that if Banks put more time
and effort into his writing, he’d produce better books. Dead Air, his last
mainstream fiction book, was completed in six weeks. Garbadale took quite a
few weeks longer.
“I had to ask for a three-month extension for this one,” he says over espresso
in his kitchen, while Hartley gets ready to go out. “Then that turned into
six months. I couldn’t really concentrate on the book. I didn’t have the
brain power. When I sat down to write it, however, it went very quickly. My
girlfriend and I were just starting to go out at the time. We were love’s
young dream — well love’s middle-aged dream — and I can’t remember writing
the book. I don’t want to trivialise it, but it was an easy birth.”
The creative energy came “not so much from starting a new relationship —
wonderful though that’s been — as finishing the old one”. “My wife and I had
many great years together but the last two were horrible,” he says. “We’d
been together for a quarter of a century and you don’t spend that amount of
time with somebody and get an easy exit. It’s bound to hurt. There are so
many memories. I think there may be some of that coming out in the book, a
sense of relief of being able to write without this horrible cloud of a
relationship going bad hanging over me.”
Banks’s charmed life — he spends nine months a year enjoying himself and three
months writing — might bother a less secure writer. Given that he earns a
quarter of a million pounds a year and is on worryingly familiar terms with
his local Porsche dealership — until September he had four motors, two of
them Porsches until he went green and opted for a hybrid duel-powered car —
he comes across as a tad eccentric.
“I haven’t experienced much trauma,” he admits. “Perhaps I would be a better
writer if I had. Splitting up with my wife is the worst thing that has ever
happened to me. Mum and dad are still alive so I’m not even an orphan yet.”
His sheltered life hasn’t stopped him dealing with dark and unpleasant
material in his books. In the Wasp Factory he describes the murder of young
children in a disturbingly matter-of-fact way, overlaid with grotesque
humour. “Depraved” and “highly talented” crop up a lot in the reviews.
“My theory is that if I’d had something horrible in my past I’d go off that
kind of writing,” he says. Does he believe an author has a moral
responsibility to his readers and his characters?
“It’s a balance each writer has to come up with for himself,” he says. “Nobody
is forced to read the books. It’s almost impossible to write something that
is more horrible than what happens in real life. We are a psychopathic
species. The history of the 20th century is steeped in blood. Public
morality is currently going backwards. The attitudes of the Bush
administration in particular are disgraceful. We’ve lost our moral compass.
I think it has a real knock-on effect.
“If I, as a comfortably well-off, white male was that annoyed and upset about
the war, how the hell do you think a young Muslim man is going to feel? Is
it any wonder some of them turn to extreme violence and kill innocent
people?”
He describes himself as “a militant woolly liberal”, but sounds like an
apologist for suicide bombers. How did he feel when the bombers struck
London? “As horrified as anybody else,” he says. “I don’t support them or
anything. But if you are a humanist, as I am, the people you despise are
those who kill innocent people. It doesn’t matter who they are. It’s not
about choosing sides. At a certain point you just say: ‘A curse on all their
houses’.”
Gordon Brown is a near neighbour. “I was upset when I realised not only was I
not the most important person in my village, but also I wasn’t even the most
important person in my street,” he laughs. “Brown is definitely going to be
better than Blair. He doesn’t have the same moral responsibility for the
war. I don’t feel he’s as culpable. Blair is an opportunist. If Brown had
been in charge it seems unlikely we would have been involved in the war.
Mind you, he does holiday in Cape Cod.”
Despite his backing for Brown, Banks is thinking of voting for the Scottish
Socialist party at the election in May. “People get accused of being
champagne socialists,” he laughs. “Well, I’ve become a vintage champagne
socialist. Mind you, if the SSP wins I might end up a tax exile in Berwick.”
He has gone green in the past year and is now down to one car — a hybrid Lexus
— and a motorcycle. He’s waiting for planning permission to erect a wind
turbine.
Given the claustrophobia of his fictional families, it is surprising to learn
he never rebelled as a child. His father was a naval officer and his mother,
Effie, was a professional ice skater. The family moved from Rosyth to
Greenock when he was nine and his ambition to be a writer dates from about
that period. “Being an only child, I was spoiled,” he says. “Not materially
or in an undisciplined way. Spoiled isn’t really the word . . .” What he is
trying to describe, I suggest, is unconditional love. “Absolutely,” he says.
“I felt completely secure and loved. I had the very best start in life.”
The Wasp Factory was not published until he was 30, but his parents encouraged
him to follow his dream of becoming a novelist. “Mum and dad taught me to
believe in myself,” he says. “I have a cast-iron ego. I don’t suffer from
false modesty as regards my imagination. I have a bloody good imagination.”
Despite having had 23 books published, he struggles to think of himself as an
author. “I remember feeling unnerved when I realised, four or five books in,
that it was a proper career,” he says. “It wasn’t a lark anymore. People had
expectations of me. I still have that feeling of ‘gosh, I wonder what real
writers do at this point?’ I see writing as a hobby I just happen to get
grossly overpaid for.”
Most of his main characters reflect some aspect of his personality, he says.
He jokes that they are more talented and better with women. They are also
younger and harder living. He’s tried most illegal drugs with the exception
of heroin but has given them up. He has also cut back on drink, having
consumed 80 bottles of single malt researching his autobiographical book Raw
Spirit.
On the jacket of the uncorrected proof of The Steep Approach to Garbadale,
Banks has invoked an inconsistent triad. “Love. Family. Truth. Choose two of
the above,” it reads. Which would he choose?
“I’d probably go for family and truth and, in a self-sacrificial way, leave
love out of it,” he says. “When you are a fiction writer you have to have a
close regard for the truth. It matters a lot. You are so used to making
stuff up. When you do invoke the idea of truth, you have to make sure you
get it spot on.”
There are, though, truths and truths. Banks’s characters rarely suffer the
consequences of their destructive lifestyles. He has had the chance to see
the grim effects of alcoholism close up. Is he not guilty of perpetrating a
lie by glamorising drink and drugs?
“I don’t tend to dwell on the darker stuff,” he says, “but then the whole of
society and the government keep telling us drugs are bad. If they are so
bloody horrible why do so many people take them? So that’s the excuse for
that.”
The ultimate baby-boomer, he likes children but has never wanted his own.
“Partly I think it’s selfishness,” he says. “I’m still trying to retain a
boyishness about being 53.”
He is succeeding. His only concessions to hitting his half century are taking
half an Aspirin a day and giving up biscuits. “Oh yes,” he says, “and I’ve
stopped listening to Radio 1 all the time.”
The Steep Approach To Garbadale by Iain Banks is published by Little, Brown on
Thursday. Banks’s books The Wasp Factory was his first novel and a
macabre tale about a teenage boy growing up in a remote Scottish village.
The Steep Approach to Garbadale is his 12th mainstream novel as Iain Banks and
his 23rd book. He inserted M as a middle initial for his science-fiction
novels.
Most of his sci-fi books are set in an universe inhabited by a multi-species
civilisation called the Culture — this interstellar utopia is regularly
plagued by wars, diplomatic crises, invasions, aggressive empires and
threats to end humanity.
Three of Banks’s novels have been adapted for radio and screen — Espedair
Street, The Crow Road and Complicity. The latter was made into a film
starring Brian Cox and Jonny Lee Miller.
The Crow Road was made into a Bafta-winning television series in the mid1990s
starring Joseph McFadden.
Raw Spirit, Banks’s one work of nonfiction, is a guide to Scottish whisky
distilleries.
