Verbal Magazine

Pulp Fiction

If there was ever to be a poster boy for the hard working novelist, Iain Banks would certainly fit the bill. 

If there was ever to be a poster boy for the hard working novelist, Iain Banks would certainly fit the bill. Sitting on his laurels and waiting for inspiration is something that the Scotsman simply does not do.

Having written over 22 novels since the immediate success of his controversial debut novel, The Wasp Factory in 1984, Banks sways somewhere between literary author and science fiction superstar, alternating the two forms every year or so - using the pseudonym of Iain M Banks for his sci fi books.

‘I always say my writing is like being a cabinet maker.  One day you make a chair, the next a table.  They have very different uses but to the person making them that’s almost irrelevant; you are the same person using the same skills, tools and materials.  I suppose I can let my imagination rip a bit more in the science fiction novels, but that’s about it.’

Since the success of his first cult classic over 25 years ago, much of Banks’s fiction has dealt with marginalised characters, embedded with severe narcissistic and sexual idiosyncrasies. Do the characters that come alive in his novels, represent a quest for an alter ego that exists inside the author’s head? His answer on this is drenched in ambiguity, but he does admit that there are shades of himself in even some of his most devious characters.

‘I suppose my central characters, being in the middle of the plot, the story, tend to be more men of action than the average, even if it’s action imposed upon them as it were, so they act as a counterpoint to the writer’s relatively solitary, contemplative, observational life (unless you’re Hemmingway of course!). But yes, I do write parts of myself into the characters.  Frank Cauldhame, in The Wasp Factory for example had my adolescent dam-building, kite-making, bomb-manufacturing interests, but raised obviously to a pathological level.’
Banks admits that it is plot, not characters that are the driving force behind his novels. Characters then have a way of building themselves into that plot as best they can he says. Maybe it’s his laid back Scottish manner, but you get a sense that there is a lack of seriousness regarding his approach to his art form when he talks about it. His prolific nature has raised certain questions from literary critics in recent years - with one of his novels taking just six weeks to write. However, he is quick to rebuke on this, describing his method of writing as fast, yet fastidious nonetheless.

‘I take my work quite seriously.  It’s me I don’t take seriously.  And I’m just being honest about the typing-up time.  The way I work, the really important stuff - the thinking and planning and plotting - has already happened by then so the rest is just getting it down on screen.  I suspect most writers think/plan as they go along and so they take longer.  I separate the two.  My writing, it’s not especially cathartic - I have little to be cathartic about - but it’s more than just a day job.  It is my life; if I was marooned forever on a desert island or woke up to find myself the last person on Earth, I’d still want to write.’

As well as writing about psychopaths and drug fuelled hedonists, much of Banks’s left wing political doctrines can be found seeping through the pages of his novels; particularly in his science fiction work, where he created: ‘The Culture’- a fictional, anarchic, egalitarian, utopian society - where technology enables enough material for everyone, and where the concept of possessions is eradicated.

Although ‘The Culture’ is a fictional concept, it was no doubt conceived out of Banks’s disdain for the capitalist system that he inhabits in the real world. But was this fictional utopia a sympathetic salute to the red flag of Marxism, or just a clinical critique of the right wing establishment?

‘No, I wouldn’t say the Culture was a tribute to extreme Marxism or communism as such.  The idea behind the Culture, from the start, back in the 70s when I started thinking about it, was that it was where you ended up whether you liked it or not; almost no matter where you started from - Capitalism, Fascism, Socialism, whatever - if you have any sort of development or progress at all, you end up with the Culture. Even if you try to avoid it, The Culture is an optimist’s hope though, and with its emphasis on continual and thoroughly distributed democratic decision-making, the implied triumph of reason and its attitude of amused contempt towards the very idea of money it probably is technically sort of anarcho-socialist.’

Political statements are something Banks isn’t shy of making. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he famously ripped his passport up and sent it to Tony Blair in 10 Downing Street. For all his political rhetoric however, when challenged about bringing about real change in the political system he vehemently opposes, Banks says he’s too much of a libertarian to ever even consider joining a political party, acutely aware of his own hypocrisies.

‘I’m a vintage champagne socialist, that’s my problem.  Politics never really occurred to me as a career choice.  I’d have been rubbish, anyway as a politician; I’m incapable of sticking to a party line.  I’d be flouncing out at the first minor doctrinal disagreement.’
Banks’s latest novel, Transition, his 23rd to date, sees Banks returning to the more complex style of writing that he started out with in the 1980s, creating an alternative reality for his troubled protagonists. He says that after recent novels such as Dead Air and The Steep Approach to Garbadale, which dealt with conventional real world themes, such as class and sexuality, he decided it would be more interesting to return to a quirkier, complex and more layered style of writing.
‘The template I used for my latest novel Transition was The Bridge, my third novel, which I still rate very highly.  I thought it would be fun to try to knit the two strands of my writing back together again, and to go for a bit more complexity compared to my relatively straightforward recent novels. I do however worry sometimes about making books complex and ‘clever’ just for the sake of it, which feels a bit sort of showily shallow.  However, I’m very happy with Transition.’

At 55 Banks shows no sign of slowing down as far as churning out new material is concerned. He has however, recently sold off his vast collection of fast cars and says when he is not writing, he spends his days reading, hill walking and tinkering with music, and confesses to have: ‘given up all drugs except alcohol, which is probably both slightly sad and quite wise.’

Above all, Banks is a rationalist, an optimist and a realist. Just like the world his literature inhabits, he is hopeful for mankind’s future, given the right decisions are made by the major economic powers of the world. 

‘I guess as a society we’ll muddle through as usual in the next ten to 15 years, though the effects of global warming would seem to - and should - preclude any business-as-usual approach.  I do think that the kind of dingbat greedism we’ve seen over the last 20 years ago is unsustainable in every sense and will suffer a correction, and the longer it’s delayed and fended off the more extreme it will be.  Interesting times ahead, I think.  Uh-oh.’

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