The Crow RoadIain Banks
Scribner hardback, 501 pages, £15.99
Published April 1992
ISBN 0356206521
Review by David Clark (1992)
Dropping the middle initial (used on Banks’ SF novels) for the first time since the inferior Canal Dreams) Iain Banks returns to the ‛mainstream’ novels which made his name – the dramatic The Wasp Factory, and the self-consciously smart Walking on Glass. In contrast to some of the more experimental of those novels (I’ve just waded through most of them), The Crow Road is a rites of passage/coming of age family saga, beginning with a funeral and including some deaths to keep things ticking along. The ‛Crow Road’ being, of course, the road of the dead.
The second generation narrator is Prentice (as in ‛apprentice’, geddit?) McHoan, a self-disparaging student and would be wit who moves between his Argyll family home and his Glasgow bedsit. He also swings between his unrequited lusting for his cousin Verity and the religious crisis that has built a barrier between him and his atheist author father. Prentice, a likeable if occasionally annoying storyteller, comes over as a quite ‛ordinary bloke’ despite his frequently inebriated extended family’s moneyed background. The glass factory-owning tribe meditate on astronomy, travel and stand-up comedy, under the spectre of Prentice’s errant Uncle Rory – the ghost at the family feast – a writer who vanished years previously.
Banks blends Prentice’s tales and reminiscences of childhood with flashbacks to the history of his family and their motley collection of acquaintances. Some time is spent separating the strands and assigning relationships. The Crow Road borders on the over-long in this stretch but Banks just about manages things. The novel then settles in to an unravelling of the last scribblings and testaments of the disappeared Rory, alongside the trials and tribulations of the living family and Prentice’s neatly-handled love affair. Through it all, Banks weaves the threads of the murder mystery that fuels the book’s second half to page-turning effect, as Prentice completes his slow penetration of the family mysteries.
Taken (as some seem intent on doing) as a serious contemporary novel, laced with profundity, The Crow Road actually works. I’ll certainly take it over Martin bloody Amis and Ian no-good-since-the-early-short-story-collections McEwan. Taken as the latest entry in the darkly comic oeuvre of ‛Iain Banks’ it is, perhaps, Banks’ most successful work since 1986’s The Bridge. Iain Banks is now a heavyweight novelist, and The Crow Road is a likeable mainstream novel/piece of literary fiction.