Scratch Pad 20
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Scratch Pad 20 Based on the non-Mailing Comments section of The Great Cosmic Donut of Life No. 9, a magazine written and published by Bruce Gillespie, 59 Keele Street, Victoria 3066, Australia (phone (03) 9419-4797; email: [email protected]) for the December 1996 mailing of Acnestis. Contents 1 A TASTE FOR MAYHEM: PRELIMINARY NOTES 3 BOOKS READ SINCE AUGUST 1996 by Bruce ON iAIN BANKS’S NON-SF NOVELS by Bruce Gillespie Gillespie A TASTE FOR MAYHEM: Preliminary notes on IAIN BANKS’S NON-SF NOVELS Presented as a talk to the Nova Mob, Melbourne’s SF discussion group, 6 November 1996. At the same meeting, Race Mathews gave a talk about Iain Bank’s SF novels, which I’ll reprint as soon as possible. The legend sitting room was only about six or seven feet away so I Banks, Iain with or without a middle ‘M.’, is the stuff of handed my drink to one of the people (I think they were legend. from Andromeda Bookshop in Birmingham) cause I’d The legend runs that he had published three novels spotted a loophole, you see, because I wasn’t actually before someone told him he was an SF writer and climbing. This was about the third or fourth storey, and dragged him along to a convention. The legend adds it was actually a traverse; I wasn’t actually gaining any that he decided to join the SF community and write real height. So I did this, but unfortunately at the same time SF books when he discovered the capacity of the British as this there was a burglar taking things next door and fan for putting away booze at conventions. the suite adjoining that, which was part of the conven- tion where they were getting together the daily news- The legend hints that he absorbs as much booze and paper. This person appeared and walked off with some illegal chemicals as he ascribes to his characters. This jewellery and a camera and other bits and pieces. Fortu- can’t be true, or he’d be dead by now. nately the lady who was asleep in there got a glimpse of Another legend has him abseiling the outside wall of him and he didn’t look at all like me. He had short hair a hotel during a convention, an adventure that he and no beard — at the time I had much longer hair — ascribes to a character in Espedair Street. and he didn’t have a Scottish accent. Are these legends true? Iain Banks confirms some of About half an hour later I was sitting talking to this them in an interview with Alan Stewart (Ethel the Aard- totally young-looking policeman who looked like he vark, March 1992). The story of the wall-climbing inci- shouldn’t be out on the streets at that time of night, dent is even weirder than the legend: saying, well, actually I was staying at the hotel. They didn’t even take my name, let alone take a statement from me. It used to be when I got drunk I loved climbing things After about four hours’ sleep, myself and John Jar- like buildings and bits of industrial plant and machinery: rold, my science fiction editor for Orbit, went down to that sort of stuff. I promised my girl friend I’d stop doing the bar and found out what exactly had happened. At it, but then I was standing on the outside of the Metro- ten o’clock in the morning we were there for a morning pole Hotel chatting with Tony Roxborough who’s editor hot starter as it were, and I was ordering John’s gin and at Ventura. It was part of a suite of rooms with this tonic and my bloody mary when this American guy came enormous gigantic bedroom and I was standing at the up and said ‘Hey, they let you out’. I didn’t believe him, end of this balcony after an enormously long party — and said, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Why aren’t you about 5 o’clock in the morning — the sun was just in jail or prison?’ he wanted to know. I’m still asking him coming up. I spotted that this other balcony outside the 1 what’s he talking about. In The Bridge, as we are shown at the beginning of the It seems that this rumour had started up instantly novel, a car accident has pitched the main character that I was a cat burglar, an international jewel thief, and into a self-constructed alternate reality. In this alternate that either I’d been abseiling down from the top of the reality, a city exists on a bridge that stretches in each hotel dressed as an SAS, you know anti-terrorist squad, direction to the horizon. Its pylons are anchored in a with the balaclava and all the rest, dressed in black, or line of islands that stretch across this huge stretch of that I was dressed in a Spiderman outfit. Several people water. A train service provides transport along the city, swore blind they’d seen all this happen. One and a half and all human activity, including work, entertainment thousand Americans left that day to go back to the States and living areas can be found on the bridge. In the and they all left believing this had happened. book’s last pages, the main character awakes after many months in a coma. It has all been a dream, not a separate When Banks was in Melbourne, although he was not fantasy world. allowed by his Penguin minder to meet the SF fans, he was interviewed on radio by Terry Lane. During that ‘The Wasp Factory’ interview he confessed to a ‘taste for mayhem’. Banks’s first great success, the book that created the In talking about the main character of a much later Banks legend at one go, was The Wasp Factory, a bizarre novel, Complicity, Banks said of him: ‘A deeply unpleas- concoction that seems to surpass all barriers of good or ant character. My hope and expectation was to offend bad taste. As the uniquely icky character says of himself: as many people with Complicity as I did with The Wasp ‘Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young Factory.’ brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after Is the legend true? that I did for my young cousin, Esmerelda, more or less Mayhem? Offensive? All part of the legend, no doubt, on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t but the secret of Banks’s success is that he never offends, killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again. no matter what his characters do. His style is chatty but It was just a stage I was going through.’ always precise and vivid, funny without being wildly The Wasp Factory’s main character is an isolated chap grotesque, visionary without being pretentious. In who spends most of his time on an island that is barely short, Banks is not ‘the artist as public nuisance’, as joined to the mainland by dunes. He has set it up as a Robert Hughes described the visual artist of the late private fortress. His father has allowed him to miss twentieth-century, but the artist as private charmer. This school altogether, and he has constructed around him- is art that hides art, delicious to read, but difficult to talk self a primeval world of signs, portents and warnings that about. keep everybody at bay except his father. The book Banks can write well because he’s had lots of practice. begins as the boy’s father warns him that his psychotic In the Interzone interview (No. 86, August 1994) Banks brother Eric has escaped from custody and his heading says that he wrote and submitted, during a period of 16 back home. years, six novels before he had anything accepted for As I’ve said, Banks confesses to an enjoyment of publication. Also, he wrote Consider Phlebas before The mayhem. ‘Mayhem’ is a mild word for what happens in Wasp Factory, his first novel, was published. The Wasp Factory, which is narrated by a very unreliable witness. The thesis of Kev McVeigh is that not only has Double career? Frank not killed his brother, sister and cousin, but that Banks has surprisingly little to say about the nature of they probably never existed. Mad Eric might not exist his double career. ‘I definitely feel more at home with either. If that is the case, who is Frank’s father, and what SF because you’ve got far more control . But by a does he believe is happening when Frank purports to degree, fraction, writing mainstream fiction is more re- take phone calls from the crazed Eric? And what hap- warding, simply because you feel you’ve achieved more pens at the end, when Eric does seem to put in an having had to wrestle with reality as well as with your appearance? imagination.’ The power of this book is in its tone of cheerful The dividing lines between Banks’s SF and his non- malevolence. A tale told by a funny, articulate murder- SF are thin. The first three novels purport to be founded ous paranoid is a lot more interesting than the bio- in ‘ordinary’ reality, but it’s a rickety foundation. Walk- graphy of John Q. Citizen. Here, more than anywhere ing on Glass, for instance, is divided into three sections, else in his work, Banks uses the power of seemingly seemingly unconnected.