Iain Banks

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Biography

Iain Banks was born in Dunfermline, Fife, in Scotland in 1954 and was educated at Stirling University where he read English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. He moved to London and lived in the south of England until 1988 when he returned to Fife where he now lives with his wife. He is almost unique in that he has achieved success in two genres: mainstream, literary fiction; and the science fiction books written under the name Iain M. Banks.

His first literary novel, The Wasp Factory (1984), immediately established Banks as an original voice in Scottish fiction, providing a contrast to the urban realism of such writers as William McIlvanney and James Kelman. The book tells the story of 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, a self-confessed multiple murderer living alone with his father, waiting for the return of his half-brother Eric, an escapee from a mental institution.

Subsequent novels explore gothic settings, determinedly anti-Thatcherite contemporary politics, pop culture and technology. Walking on Glass (1985), follows three interwoven narratives, partly set in London. It was followed by The Bridge (1986), about the complex dreams of a coma patient, dominated by the spectre of a bridge. Espedair Street (1987) draws on the author's enthusiasm for rock music and tells the story of Daniel 'Weird' Weir and his band 'Frozen Gold'.

The Crow Road (1992) centres on Prentice McHoan, a student, negotiating sex, drink and death in the midst of a wealthy but eccentric Scottish family. Complicity (1993), also set in Scotland, follows a journalist who uncovers white-collar crime and corruption among the upper-classes. Whit (1995) is a portrait of a religious community in Scotland. The central character in The Business (1999) is Kate Telman, a successful businesswoman working for a multinational company negotiating to buy a country in order to take a place on the United Nations. When she becomes romantically involved with the country's leader, doubts begin to grow in her mind as to the benefits of capitalist ownership. Iain Banks' novel, Dead Air (2002), begins on 11 September 2001 and narrates the adventures of a 'shock-jock' in contemporary London. His latest novel is The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007).

1987 saw the publication of Banks' first science-fiction novel. Reviewing Complicity (1993) in the London Review of Books in 1993 (13 November 1993), John Sutherland wrote: 'As with the novelist/entertainer Graham Greene (acknowledged as one of his favourite writers), there are two Bankses. Iain Banks is the author of six 'straight' novels. Iain M. Banks is the author of six science fiction novels. We are, I think, meant to see the writers in a Siamese connection, joined from birth but separate.' The restrained and taut prose of his literary fiction contrasts heavily with the vast science fiction sagas, in which he allows his imagination free reign to explore new worlds and a technological and a political vision through the 'Culture', a utopian organisation which contrasts with the dystopia created by many writers working in the genre. The Culture is a benign, post-sexist society, peopled with strong female characters. His science fiction writing includes the novels Consider Phlebas (1987), The Player of Games (1988), The Use of Weapons (1990), Against a Dark Background (1993), Feersum Endjinn (1994), Excession (1996) and Look to Windward (2000), as well as The State of the Art (1989), a novella and collected short stories. His most recent science fiction books are The Algebraist (2004) and Matter (2008).

Iain Banks' novels have attracted the attention of film-makers and broadcasters. His 1992 novel, The Crow Road, was successfully adapted by the BBC into a four-part television series, and Espedair Street (1987) was produced as a BBC Radio 4 Series, for which Banks wrote the accompanying music and lyrics. The film rights for the book have been sold and Banks has been contracted to write the songs. Plans for film versions of Complicity, The Wasp Factory and The Bridge are all underway.

He has also written Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram (2003), a personal journey through the highlands and islands of Scotland in exploration of the history and mystery of malt whisky.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Fiction, Science-fiction, Short stories, Song lyrics

Bibliography

The Wasp Factory   Macmillan, 1984

Walking on Glass   Macmillan, 1985

The Bridge   Macmillan, 1986

Consider Phlebas   (as Iain M. Banks)   Macmillan, 1987

Espedair Street   Macmillan, 1987

The Player of Games   (as Iain M. Banks)   Macmillan, 1988

Canal Dreams   Macmillan, 1989

The State of the Art   (as Iain M. Banks)   Macmillan, 1989

The Use of Weapons   (as Iain M. Banks)   Orbit, 1990

The Crow Road   Scribners, 1992

Against a Dark Background   (as Iain M. Banks)   Orbit, 1993

Complicity   Little, Brown, 1993

Feersum Endjinn   (as Iain M. Banks)   Orbit, 1994

Whit   Little, Brown, 1995

Excession   (as Iain M. Banks)   Orbit, 1996

A Song of Stone   Abacus, 1997

Inversions   (as Iain M. Banks)   Orbit, 1998

The Business   Little, Brown, 1999

Look to Windward   (as Iain M. Banks)   Orbit, 2000

Dead Air   Little, Brown, 2002

Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram   Century, 2003

Scottish Writers Talking II: In Interview   (contributor)   Tuckwell, 2003

The Algebraist   (as Iain M. Banks)   Orbit, 2004

The Steep Approach to Garbadale   Little, Brown, 2007

Matter   (as Iain M. Banks)   Orbit, 2008

Read about books by Iain Banks at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Iain Banks at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

2005   Hugo Award   The Algebraist

2008   Catherine Maclean Prize   (shortlist)   The Steep Approach to Garbadale

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Critical Perspective

An Iain Banks novel can be characterised by its mordant wit, swift pace and keen sense of the contemporary. His work displays a meticulous attention to detail. He has an engineer’s eye and the soul of a literary architect. There is an interest in the shape, form and constitution of things. There is also a fascination with the big questions of mortality, morality and religion. Yet much of the appeal of Iain Banks is due to his natural feel for the crafting of entertaining, compelling stories, which demonstrate great tension and momentum.

The desire to shock, or to explore extremes of behaviour, has always been a feature of Iain Banks’ work. Both Complicity (1993) and Dead Air (2002) are peopled with fast living, fast talking characters who embroil themselves in dealings with the criminal underworld. The Crow Road (1992) begins with the unforgettable line: ‘It was the day my grandmother exploded;’ and in The Wasp Factory (1984), the author’s sensational, gothic horror debut, the 16-year old narrator Frank Cauldhame dismisses the murders he has committed as: ‘a stage I was going through.’ Banks also enjoys playing games with his readers and demands of them considerable textual sensitivity. Cinematic-style flashbacks, leaps in temporal perspective and multiple points of view are all trademarks. Such daring, formal complexity has been widely praised. The Crow Road, Complicity and The Bridge (1986) – three of Banks' most satisfying novels to date – are all characterised by an intricate construction handled with such a sureness of touch that the reader is more engaged than frustrated. Banks regularly unsettles the reader’s assumptions about his protagonists. In The Crow Road, Complicity and Look to Windward (2000), the reader’s ideas as to who the characters are prove to be unfounded in the final third when certain revelations cause a complete re-evaluation of everything that has gone before. Banks evidently relishes this form of literary rug-pulling. It exemplifies his desire to supply the reader with narrative challenges. However, of all the author’s many qualities the one which stands out above the rest is his ability to shift mode, whether it be in the Borges-like surrealism of The Bridge, the Grand Guignol of The Wasp Factory, or in the vast and all encompassing space operas that he writes under the name of Iain M. Banks.

Much of Banks’ work deals with power and identity. Ken Nott, the self-regarding narrator of Dead Air, is obsessed with those who hold dominion over others whilst simultaneously exalting in the privilege of being able to speak his mind over the airwaves as a close to the knuckle DJ. In The Wasp Factory, a dark, poetic, unsettling dissection of the mind of a childhood psychopath, Frank governs his small island keep, ‘an unchallenged lord of the island.’ He is obsessed with his control over living creatures. Each death becomes a victory for him, proving his demonic ability to remove life. The novel was written during the Thatcher years and might be read as a parable of the cult of the individual taken to a grotesque and disturbing extreme, a satire as sharply observed as Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, even if it is markedly different in style and execution.

Banks is also interested in the relationship between power and duplicity. In The Wasp Factory Frank is deceived by his father. Only at the end of the novel does he discover the truth about himself. In The Crow Road Prentice McHoan believes that his family are keeping important information from him yet eventually learns that he is as much a victim of self-deception as anything else. This is a theme taken up once more in The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007), in which Alban Wopuld returns home to his family’s estate where he discovers the truth about his mother’s suicide. The Bridge, in which a man lies in a coma after a car crash, is an extended study in deception; in this instance it is the reader who is the primary victim. In this novel, Banks most challenging, the reader is left to discern the difference between fantasy and reality in order to discover the precise nature and location of events.

In his science-fiction Banks has given the relationship between man and machine a fresh and invigorating examination. So successful has he been in this area that he has come to be seen as something of a standard bearer for modern science-fiction writing. Most of Banks’ science-fiction novels concern an essentially benevolent and technologically advanced society called The Culture, administered by incredibly intelligent machines called ‘Minds.’ Banks has described The Culture as ‘about the nearest thing to a Utopia that I can imagine whose inhabitants remain human.’ The Culture attempts to institute a world harmonious for all, yet one which does not lose sight of the individual. However, Banks is not the kind of writer who would deem such an idealised world the stuff of engaging fiction. This futuristic ‘utopia of affluence’ is therefore bedevilled by problems and possessed of a ruthless intent to pursue its own course. Look to Windward investigates the consequences of a devastating civil war – a war brought about as a mistake on the part of The Culture – while the first Iain M. Banks novel, Consider Phlebas (1987) is as full of wanton death and destruction as The Wasp Factory. Yet Banks has carved out a niche for himself by the attempt to delineate a benign vision of the future. This is all the more laudable when you consider that it is almost mandatory for science fiction writers to create dystopian futurescapes.

There is a danger of a too neat separation of Banks’ work into non science-fiction and scienc-fiction. Indeed, a close examination reveals several crossovers and incongruities. A Song of Stone (1997), one of what William Gibson has called Banks’ ‘non genre novels,’ is without time or place, closer in tone to Inversions (1998) – a Culture novel – than to any other book; while Feersum Endjinn (1994), a beautifully sustained far future novel, much of which is written phonetically, recalls the bold ambition of The Bridge.

However, there is a sense in which Banks is freed by science fiction to explore the outer reaches of his own imagination; and his creation of a civilisation whose nobility of aim and purpose, while not flawless, is nevertheless far more enlightened than the one in which we all currently reside, is extremely attractive. It is perhaps redolent of how the author would like to view the contemporary world, one which he so often calls into question with coruscating attacks on avarice, hypocrisy and power.

No analysis of the work of Iain Banks can escape the idea that in recent years his novels have lacked the narrative flair, style, wit and chutzpah of his early fiction. His most recent science-fiction novel, The Algebraist (2004) – this time not set in the Culture universe, although it shares many of the concerns of those books, namely the influence of a progressive civilisation on those considered less modern – does not have the same bite and pizzazz as The Player of Games (1988) for instance. Banks' most recent novel, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, although reminiscent of The Crow Road – with similar ruminations on lost love, the idea of a great return to the family home, the revealing of secrets, a wayward soul investigating the root of the restlessness – does not compare with what might just prove to be Banks’ masterpiece. The Crow Road is one of the finest British novels of the last 20 years, an entirely convincing and gripping epic saga. Formally controlled and featuring a memorable central character, it is by turns funny, poignant and deeply affecting. Dead Air and The Steep Approach to Garbadale are two of the weakest novels Iain Banks has written. They have his customary narrative drive and are entertaining enough, but those coming to the author for the first time would be well advised to start with Complicity, The Crow Road, Consider Phlebas or The Wasp Factory – a body of work which places Banks among the most original novelists of recent times.

Garan Holcombe, 2008

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Author statement

'I write because I love it, I enjoy it, I've spent most of my life trying to do it better, and I can make a living from it: beats a day job.'

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Little, Brown Book Group Little Brown Book Group 100, Victoria Embankment London  EC4Y 0DY England Tel: +44 (0)20 7911 8000 Fax: +44 (0)20 7911 8100 E-mail: info@littlebrown.co.uk http://www.littlebrown.co.uk		Agent Mic Cheetham Literary Agency 11-12 Dover Street London  W1S 4LJ England Tel: +44 (0)20 7495 2002 Fax: +44 (0)20 7495 5777 E-mail: info@miccheetham.com http://www.miccheetham.com
Also published by Orbit Little, Brown Book Group 100, Victoria Embankment London  EC4Y 0DY England Tel: +44 (0)020 7911 8000 Fax: +44 (0)20 7911 8100 E-mail: orbit@littebrown.co.uk http://www.littlebrown.co.uk

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