A Critical Study of the Novels of Iain Banks Being a Thesis Submitted In
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THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL Bridging Fantasies: A Critical Study of the Novels of Iain Banks being a Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull by Martyn James Colebrook, BA, MA (February 2012) 2 Introduction Fear and Loathing in Midlothian 6 Chapter 1 “These Things of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine”: The Wasp Factory, Gender Performance and The Gothic 29 1.1 Gothic and Mental Disorder. 48 Chapter 2 The Player of Games? 66 2.1 Games and Fictionality. 67 2.2 The Player of Games and The Magus: A Comparative Study 81 2.3 Playing Games with Identity? 85 Chapter 3 Journeys into the Silent Land: The Bridge and Lanark: A Life in Four Books. 98 3.1 The Bridge and Lanark: Narrating Scotland as a Post-industrial Space. 102 3.2 The Bridge and the Contemporary Gothic. 123 Chapter 4 Moving out of the comfort ‘Zone’: Canal Dreams. 132 4.1 Not Playing by the Rules of the games: Canal Dreams and Genre. 136 4.2 “Maestro Please”: Memory and Performance. 146 4.3 Troubles with Banks: A political writer or a writer of political fiction? 158 Chapter 5 The Questions of Scotland: The Crow Road. 168 5.1 Landscape and Fiction. 170 5.2 The Crow Road and the Postmodern Gothic. 183 Chapter 6 ‘Mad Lad Lit’: Iain Banks’ Complicity. 192 6.1 Three Writers Who Go Down into the Darkness: The Games of Contemporary Scottish Crime Fiction. 195 3 6.2 Complicity and Terror. 222 6.3 Complicity, Sheepshagger and Violence. 230 6.4 Complicity and Bodies of Evidence. 239 Chapter 7 Conclusion 246 Bibliography 249 4 Dedication There are many people to whom I owe many thanks for this thesis as it presently stands: if you are not mentioned here, I will have thanked you in person or by another means of communication. This thesis is dedicated to my mother, Wendy Colebrook, and my grandfather, Brian Taylor, who gave me the motivation and the means to propose the subject but sadly didn’t see the beginning. Their memories are the underpinning momenta behind the topic and the modes of expression. I suspect, in their own ways, they will find a method for reading it, as they did for everything else I wrote. For his exceptional levels of professional supervision, direction and advice I can offer nothing but thanks to Dr Bruce Woodcock, whose inexhaustible patience and commitment has seen this project through to its current aegis. Dr Bethan Jones offered invaluable insight and suggestions (even before it began) and made the Annual Progress Reviews and weekend afternoon breaks watching the football a lot more enjoyable than they would have been otherwise. For additional financial support I would like to thank the Ferens Trust at the University of Hull for their award of a 4 year Fees Bursary in 2004. This project would not have begun without such a substantial foundation. The Carl Baron Memorial Fund’s generous award in 2006 and the University of Hull’s Graduate School Travel Award in 2008 provided opportunities to present existing research at Rutgers-Camden University and Seton Hall University in New Jersey and to obtain otherwise inaccessible research materials. There are a particular group of friends who have played more than a substantial role from this project’s inception. Dr Brian Hoyle and Dr Jodi-Ann George provided beds to sleep in, wine to drink and much sustenance when I travelled north of the border to Dundee for conferences and research; not quite Banks’ territory but still. Professor Philip Tew, Dr Nick Hubble and Steven Barfield of the Modern and Contemporary 5 Fiction Studies Network provided opportunities to present papers and organise conferences which informed a number of dimensions to the research. Professor Tew also took on the task of preparing me for the viva, offering extensive feedback on an earlier version of the thesis, prior to the amendments. Dr Mark Williams, a fellow transgressor of the policed boundaries of the popular and literary, collaborated, co- organised and co-wrote with me on a number of projects (and lived to tell the tales) which have fed into both the thematic and cultural background to this thesis; I didn’t realise long conferences and long conversations could be as enjoyable as they are. Mike “Basil” Garbutt, Dr John Hoyles, Adam Grimmer, Julie Visgandis, Dr Sumreen “Summer” Pervez, the two Janines, Hatter and Chasmer, and Mary McCollum collectively and individually managed to get me out of the house and sometimes even away from the laptop when the occasion demanded. Adele Reynolds, for your love and immeasurable confidence in me I cannot express how grateful I am. The patience, support, motivation and your inestimable capacity to pull me from the depths of despair through the toughest parts of this thesis make its conclusion even more emphatic and rewarding. I cannot even begin to indicate the extent to which without you this thesis, like me, would not be complete. Finally, after 7 years of hearing, reading and doubtlessly trying to forget about it, Stewart Colebrook, Ellen Colebrook and Gill Hunter probably know as much about Iain Banks and the other writers featured in this thesis as I do. They probably know more than they ever wished to know as well. Without their emotional and financial stability, a positive and limitlessly patient environment to write up in when the end didn’t even seem to exist, never mind seeming to be in sight, this thesis would not have been completed. I owe you more than I can ever repay. Martyn Colebrook, February 2012. 6 Introduction: ‘Fear and Loathing in Midlothian’ (Sutherland 1993: 25) Iain Banks is something of a fictional magician: a novelist who plays fantastic and transgressive games with fiction. The Banksian approach is multifaceted. When it comes to genre his aim is to twist a particular characteristic against the ‘type’ or expected function of what otherwise appears to be a very derivative novel. The real development of this is the move from simple subversion of stereotype into a way of negotiating between the aesthetic demands of genre fiction and other, sometimes more experimental, modes of writing. In this respect, texts such as The Wasp Factory (1984), Walking on Glass (1985) and The Bridge (1986) conclude with metafictional gestures which reveal the artifice of the textual games being played and brazenly expect the reader to accept such disruption as a natural consequence of literary play and experiment. It is the breaking apart of expectation precisely by revealing the genre template which generates the opportunities to demonstrate more clearly how he departs from, bridges and transgresses these generic formulae and by that definition, exacts a process for transgressing the ‘rules’ and ‘expectations’ of genre fiction. The process of transgression involved breaching and convening the relative structural and technical “givens” within a piece of fiction, manipulating the rules to produce an outcome which the reader deems to be unexpected. Banks employs the generic modes of popular fiction and techniques associated with literary fiction throughout his work to enter into a dialogue with contemporary culture as a whole, by exploring how its fringes are formulated in respect to its centres (and therefore canons). We can review the whole of Banks’ corpus in light of his continued engagements with transgression and the transgressing of genre. I intend to assess the major novels of Iain Banks, demonstrating how they contribute to his overall authorial practice. I will evaluate his fiction by examining it in relation to his oeuvre as well as the wider context of contemporary British fiction.The 7 study will consider how each text sustains itself as an individual novel and as part of an overarching arc, with recurrent images and narrative threads, constituting a body of work which is notable for its originality, its responsiveness to the concerns of the contemporary and which is characterised by the marrying of commercial success with academic neglect. Throughout I will expand upon the critical contexts of contemporary British fiction and how these different frameworks fit into the existing studies of Banks’ novels. The rationale for the provision of a context wider than contemporary Scottish fiction is determined by Banks himself who has claimed: I don’t really know enough about Scottish literature, so I’m very dubious about saying “Yes, I’m part of this tradition”. I'm certainly part of the English language tradition. I’ve been a lot more influenced by Catch 22, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Tin Drum, and almost anything by Kafka, than by anything in Scottish literature apart from the single influence of Lanark. The extent to which I am different to someone born and brought up in Reading or somewhere who had the same influences would be the crucial test . .but I don’t think that you can run controls on people in that way. (Robertson 1989-1990: 27) The resistance to Banks being presented within a specific heritage directly informs my strategy, meaning that there is a clearer sense of engagement with the present states of recent fiction as well as a far wider consideration of the trajectory into which the novels may be placed. Furthermore, this decision creates the space for a necessary discussion of the interplay between Banks and his contemporaries outside of the Scottish lineage, a topic which is notable for its absence from the existing corpus of scholarly criticism. By expanding the boundaries of debate, I am able to advance my main contention: Banks’ fiction represents a totalising and continued fascination with the transgression of boundaries, whether technical, cultural, generic, national or otherwise.