THE EDGE Interview

Iain Banks

Interview by Andrew Hedgecock (1998)

It's fourteen years since the publication of Iain Banks' controversial debut novel, The Wasp Factory. Since then he's never stopped moving. His output includes multi-layered fantasies (Walking on Glass and The Bridge); an examination of religious cults (Whit); a family saga blending black comedy, social satire and thriller elements (The Crow Road); and an examination of the moral bankruptcy and greed of Britain under the Tories (Complicity).

Banks is a politically engaged writer: his Culture novels (Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons, The Player of Games, The State of the Art and Excession), published as by Iain M Banks, link blueprints for a technological utopia with all the trappings of a baroque SF tale: vast spaceships, amazing weaponry, alien lifeforms and violent action. The distinguishing features of an Iain Banks novel, with or without the 'M', are tight plotting, bleak humour and exuberant characterisation. And his latest SF, Inversions, is no exception: it's a powerful fable of political power, love, cruelty, loyalty and deception.

I interviewed Iain Banks while he was on a recent trip to London with his friend Ken MacLeod. We meet in a bar at the Waldorf Hotel . . .

Your latest novel, Inversions, has twin narratives, with plot twists in one forcing a reappraisal of earlier events in the other, and it's crammed with irony. Are you convinced your readership have the time, energy and level of engagement to play these complex games with you?

Yes, I sincerely hope so. It's not that I go out and do market research to work out what readers can take. It's just what I feel like writing and what I feel I'd like to read as a reader of mainstream, slipstream, science fiction, whatever. All I can do is hope that it chimes with enough people so I can go on paying the bills. I thought that it was, in some ways, a fairly straightforward book, in spite of the fact that it has two intertwined but never quite meeting stories. I'd have thought Use of Weapons was far more challenging in the way it's put together than this one. But I'm probably still a bit close to Inversions at this point. It'll probably take about two or three years before I get any proper perspective on what the book is really like, so it's a bit early yet.

Talking of labels like slipstream, mainstream and SF: two or three years ago you said in an interview that you'd always been happy to be described as a science fiction writer, but at some stage your work diverted up two paths: the Iain M Banks SF and the Iain Banks stuff. Does Inversions represent a reunification?

There's not really a master plan, it's just the way things have worked out. But Inversions and Song of Stone do seem quite close in some ways. I think there is a commonality of mood, of feeling perhaps. Maybe the shape I would use to describe my trajectory now would be a hexagon, like a carbon bond. Having spotted that, and other people having spotted it, I'll probably quite deliberately go off in a different direction, just to confound people's expectations.

When you were writing A Song of Stone did it feel like a mainstream novel, and did Inversions have more of an SF feel? Did you consciously sit down and say: 'Right, I'm going to do an SF novel this time'?

I alternate between the two forms, and what I write really depends what year it is: whether it's an odd or an even year. It never crossed my mind to take Song of Stone in an SF direction, or to put it out as Iain M. Banks, it was always perfectly obvious to me that it was closer to mainstream than anything else. In the end, Inversions is really a stunningly heavily disguised Culture novel. That's what it boils down to. But I did insist that wasn't put on the cover, because it's not really a Culture novel, it doesn't have the big spaceships. One way of looking at the book is as an answer to a question that no one's actually bothered to ask me yet: how does The Culture affect lesser societies? How does it interfere with them? And this book is the answer to those questions.

Do you see your Culture novels as tackling contemporary socio-political issues as effectively as your more mainstream fiction?

In a sense, you can't escape the present when you write about the future. You're always writing about your own circumstances to some extent. But, in the end, The Culture is my secular heaven, where I'd like to live before I die. A forlorn hope. And these books are also a way of saying: 'The future might be fun, the future might be great.' It can't help but reflect the present, who we are and what we are, but, at the same time, there's always the proviso that the people of The Culture are a bit nicer than we are: they're not as xenophobic and they're more rational. That's the get-out clause: if we never achieve anything like The Culture, it's because we're bad bastards, basically.

There are some convincing, interesting and strong female characters in Inversions.

Given that I was going to have two key characters, it just seemed logical that one should be male and one female. I liked the idea of a female character in a profoundly misogynistic and gender divided society. You can have some fun with that, especially given that my main female character, the doctor, is much smarter than anyone else and a lot more knowledgeable. I like women and, deep down, I've always believed that women are smarter and more intelligent than men. The better half of the species. Definitely. Women mature, but men just get to be older boys, that's all.

I enjoyed the book's layers of ambiguity and the alternate endings offered by the narrator.

But he prefers the false one, the one which suits his personal morality better. It's pretty obvious which I intended to be the real one, but he chooses the one to fit in with the morality of his time: he's wrong and the fact that he doesn't like it is just tough.

Do you feel your most recent novels are more lyrical and introspective than your earlier work?

It's difficult to work out if that's just me getting older, more boring or more mature, choose your own epithet. Song of Stone is based on a long narrative poem called Feu de Joie that was written about 20 years ago. I had the idea of doing a novel of that poem for a very long time, and that's what Song of Stone is. I've kept a lot of the poetic language of the original. That was a conscious decision. It's a counterpoint to the brutality of the story. So the original idea came way, way back. A hell of a lot has changed, but the basic plot remains the same. There's some detail, the odd phrase and, sometimes, an entire sentence that is almost identical. In fact they're basically lifted straight from the poem. So it's not entirely a product of the period in which it was turned into a novel.

Inversions isn't either. It's based on two ideas I had a long time ago. A doctor being used to protect someone powerful but also to influence, from a position of power, a relatively under-developed society. And the idea of the hidden assassin, the person beyond suspicion who, it turns out, is the person who fools the bodyguard. Apart from just bringing those two ideas together, the book is really a product of last year, so it's probably a truer reflection of where my head was at then than A Song of Stone, which was really what I was thinking about back in 1975. But it was just a long narrative poem then, which I thought would make a good novel. I was just waiting until I felt right about doing it.

My most recent books are, in some ways, introspective about character, but I still have a hankering to do something big and splashy, something with more big spaceships but with a less ship-based narrative. I think I probably will go back and have one last go at The Culture. Something God-ish perhaps. I think Excession was the limit in terms of the non-human side of The Culture. It was really about the ships and the minds, not about the humans at all. I thought I might do a more human-based Culture story. I suppose, in some ways, Inversions was a reaction against Excession, it's low tech and very much about people. If there's any worthwhile comparison, it's to Elizabethan tragedy or something like that.

There's an identifiable underclass in Inversions, but they're defined in terms of the reactions of the powerful. Are we living in an era where it's only possible to write a political novel by portraying the people with power rather than the victims of a particular system?

I think that depends on your politics: the further towards the right you are the more you'd agree with that, but if you're a member of the Socialist Workers' Party I guess you'd reject it with all your might. It's much easier to make your point with characters who are in powerful positions, but it remains perfectly possible to write a political novel from the grass roots as it were. I don't think I'm the person to do it. I'm not really up to it, frankly: I'm irredeemably middle class, that's what it boils down to.

Do you think the political developments of recent times will feed into your work?

I'm not a big fan of New Labour. I always voted for 'old' Labour, but at the last election I voted for the SNP for the first time in my life. Not because I'm a rabid nationalist, but because they had a much more left wing set of policies regardless of the nationalist question. It was a protest vote really, our MP is Gordon Brown and he was always going to get in with a 30,000 majority, so there was no danger that my vote was going to count. Traditionally, the left has always been much harder on the people that are nearby in the political spectrum than those at the other end. I guess you can be more vehemently against the betrayal of so-called socialist policies than you can about the Tories simply being Tories. All Thatcher did was to make the Tory party much more radical than they'd ever been before. With New Labour, I guess there is more to react against, you can talk about the issue of class betrayal. I was one of the people who expected that Labour would be pretty much as they are in office. Don't get me wrong, they're better than the Tories by a long, long way and I'm still delighted the Tories got kicked out. But I have friends who thought they were pretending to be right-wing to get elected, and that once they were in they would veer to the left. I said: 'Don't be ridiculous, parties always go to the right in office.'

I think of Complicity as the most overtly political, and the darkest, of your books.

It is. It's certainly the bleakest. I'm sad to say that the most cogent quote I've ever given for anybody's book was for my own. It's on the front cover of Complicity: 'A bit like The Wasp Factory but without the happy ending and the redeeming air of cheerfulness.' It was a kind of reaction against the eighties zeitgeist and what the Tories really stood for: they committed the ultimate sin, which is selfishness. And to raise selfishness to a cardinal virtue, which is what the Tories did, I thought was the ultimate obscenity. It was a reaction against that, but I was also reacting to all the people who assumed I was trying to shock with The Wasp Factory, which I wasn't. I was just trying to tell a story. In a way I was saying: 'Right, do you want to see what I can really do when I want to shock people?' But it never really works that way: I hadn't intended to shock with The Wasp Factory but did, and Complicity didn't shock as much as I'd hoped or expected.

Did Complicity fail to shock because you'd got several well received novels under your belt and people were reviewing you in more appropriate terms?

The Wasp Factory was reviewed as a mainstream novel from a respected publisher that should have been a horror novel. The subtext of several reviews was along the lines of: 'I'm a respected critic, you're a respectable publishing house, how dare you send me this piece of shite that should have been relegated to the horror section. I shouldn't have to read this!' With the proviso that some reviewers said it was written to shock. It was so extensively reviewed that I did get people who liked it, and people who understood it but didn't like it. Competent reviews rather than glowing ones. But the whole issue of the difference in the reaction to The Wasp Factory and Complicity led me to come up with my only, and rather meagre, contribution to critical theory: the antibody theory. The Wasp Factory was like a brand new disease coming into the body of English Letters, and there were no antibodies prepared for it, so it caused a fever in the system. But the more virulent strain introduced years later which was Complicity, nastier and more violent, a more reviewer-degrading novel, caused barely a slight raising of the temperature and that was about it. The antibodies to me as a writer were in the body of English Letters and therefore able to fight off the infection.

But critics continue to focus on the violence in your novels. Does it irritate you?

No, I don't care. Frankly, that's their problem. I'm not a violent person and I've been lucky enough to never have anything violent happen to me. So it's not like I've been trying to exorcise some violent demon. To me it's just a reflection of the way the world is. There is violence out there. I do like plots and any linear story has to involve conflict to make it interesting. Maybe I get too carried away in going for the ultimate form of conflict; violent action. There probably is an extent to which it appears overly gleeful, and that probably does stem from the fact that I've never been thoroughly beaten up.

In the years since you were first published, do you feel the critical response to genre fiction has become more competent?

No. Full stop. It's exactly the same. There are a few specialist reviewers working in the genres who know what they're talking about and the other guys and gals who don't, frankly, and are determined not to find out, and will only be dismissive.

You're very positive about technology in your books. There's an openness to developments like Artificial Intelligence [AI].]

Oh yes, I'm a gadget freak. I like technology, it's good fun. And there's no way back, there's no real choice about where we go from here. It's onwards and upwards or forget it, basically. Use technology with caution: there's lots of stuff that should have a label saying 'don't try this at home'. Generally, I'm very positive. How we use technology is an expression of who we are as a species: if we use it stupidly, to harm ourselves, other species and the planet, then that's not the fault of technology, that's us, we're doing that. If, in some bizarre way, I was the only science fiction writer on the planet, then I might have a more balanced view, I might write dystopias as well. I might fulfil the traditional science fictional criterion of writing a warning for the future, but the point is, I'm not. If anything there are too many writers writing dystopias and saying: 'Watch out, the future's going to be horrible'. The Culture books are a reaction against that. It's not that I'm saying the future will inevitably be good or that technology is always great, it's partly an attempt to balance out the 'warning' SF and all those dystopias that have come out of it.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the New Worlds era, the technological SF story became a museum piece. But since the 1980s there have been people like yourself and William Gibson writing with relish about technology. What happened to put technology back on the agenda?

I'm not sure it's any single thing. These things go in cycles. If I'd been a little bit older and I'd had the luck and the skill I'm sure I'd have wanted to be included in the New Worlds set. I wouldn't have been so gung-ho about technology either. There's probably going to be another turning away from technology in the next five or ten years. It's like economic cycles, you can't put your finger on any particular thing, it's just the way it goes.

Do you feel, in any sense, that you belong to a Scottish tradition?

I suppose I must. Not consciously, but I suppose I'm Scottish and a writer, therefore I'm a Scottish writer. I suppose the way I was brought up left me feeling more British than Scottish, but that began to change with Thatcher. Like a lot of people I began to feel more Scottish during her time, I suppose because we felt alienated. We were voting one way and the English were voting another, so I thought: 'Well we're not all part of the same nation after all.' I know a lot of English people felt the same way about the Tories, but there did seem to be that dichotomy.

I guess the writer I most had in mind when I asked the question was Robert Louis Stevenson, with his moral fables and compelling adventure stories.

This comparison is beginning to worry me. Stevenson created two great archetypes: Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde. If you're a writer that's a very flattering comparison, all compliments are gratefully accepted, but I'm not convinced I can really live up to it. Of all the writers I've read, and I've read some of old RLS's stuff, he would be one of the last people I'd have compared myself to.

So what were your literary influences?

I used to read voraciously, but there was no particular author. Just the usual suspects as it were: science fiction played a part, Kafka was a big influence early on, Joseph Heller's Catch 22, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by the blessed Hunter S Thompson, The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, that had a big influence. And the Scottish tradition? No, not really. Most of the stuff that interested me was English or American. A lot of my influences were non-literary: pop, rock music, television (especially the BBC), films; and things like The Marx Brothers, the Goons and Monty Python. But I'm gratified at how well Scotland does in terms of literature, punching way above its weight: the proportion of good writers who happen to come from north of the border is greater than you'd expect given that we've only got 10% of the population. It's probably cyclical, in a few years there may well be no-one.

But we've already had at least a couple of waves. In the 1970s and 1980s there was James Kelman, Gray McIlvanney and Liz Lochhead. Now there's Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner [Morvern Caller and These Demented Lands] –

And Duncan McLean; Martin Millar, who I think is grossly underrated; Candia McWilliam who's at absolutely the other end of the scale from someone like Kelman, but she's a superb writer. But, it has to be said, I still think that Alasdair Gray is God and Lanark is The Bible.

What about the Scottish tradition of blurring genre boundaries, from James Hogg's Three Perils of Man to Alasdair Gray's Lanark, why did that develop?

This tradition certainly exists. One factor may be that there is a respect for technology and the people who are involved with it, engineers for example. In Scotland we don't have this class-ridden and, frankly, snobbish 'two nations' problem: this is largely an Oxbridge thing, where there's something not quite respectable about subjects outside the humanities. The sciences are seen as a lesser option: if you're really intelligent you take a humanities degree. The people who end up running the institutions like the BBC and the universities themselves are not technocrats, they are not people who enjoy and celebrate technology. The people who are the establishment tend to be technophobes. This just doesn't happen in Scotland: as a nation we've always celebrated technology, and the people who produce it. Science, engineering, technology, we're proud of all that and, to some extent, it's just that we don't give a damn: boundaries are there to be crossed, genres are there to be mucked around with.

And there's a respect for the storytelling tradition too?

You get the same attitude in relation to plot, which is engineering in a book and therefore not entirely respectable, it isn't intellectual, it isn't the kind of thing that a really intelligent chap or chapess wants to get mixed up in. You can't have a novel of the highest order if it's got a plot. I think that's a disgraceful attitude. I'm appalled at the very idea: you get this notion that a book must be difficult, it has to start, go on for a bit and stop. Not finish, not conclude, just stop. And that's held up to be a 'proper intellectual work'. I just do not accept that. And a lot of other Scottish writers don't. I don't mind people writing stories that resist closure and all that sort of stuff, but it's not for me, I don't particularly enjoy reading them. And I wouldn't try to stop people writing or reading that kind of novel, but it's something I feel must be strongly resisted. It's phoney intellectualism. Good plots are the engineering of books. Perhaps one thing that distinguishes me from some other writers is that I like a good, strong plot and, if possible, a nice surprise ending as well.

You're not a fan of William Burroughs then?

I've quite enjoyed some of Burroughs' stuff. You can find an overall plan in there. The plot-less novel is a valid response to – well you have to decide what it is a valid response to: the alienation of modern man in a late-capitalist society, perhaps, but you can deal with all that stuff in a novel with a plot. So my response is: been there, done that, can we get on with the real stories now please? It's been made overly respectable, raised to a height where it is seen as the absolute paradigm of good, serious, intellectual novel writing and I don't believe that's true.

Do you share the widespread pessimism about the novel? Are you confident that there will always be an audience for your kind of fiction?

I don't see why not. I think a lot of the feeling people have about the death of the novel and all that sort of stuff comes from the fact that it's not the cutting edge of media any more. I suppose that's the stuff that's on the net or it's computer games. But that doesn't actually matter. In the same way, when photography was invented, people didn't actually stop painting paintings, stop going to art galleries or stop collecting reproductions of paintings. It was just that painting was no longer the only way, or the most naturalistic way, to represent something. The novel is not now what some young, thrusting wildly ambitious kid is going to latch on to make their name in creative terms: it might not be their first choice, but it doesn't actually matter. There's always going to be enough people wanting to read novels, and I think there's always going to be enough people to write them as well. And you can do it all by yourself. I suppose that, to an extent, you can do that with games as well, but there's a sort of single-mindedness about the novel. An intimacy, I suppose.

To what extent has the influence of new media informed your own work?

Not that much really, or not that I'm conscious of, though who knows what goes on in the subconscious? I did used to play Civilisation a lot and I do sometimes wonder about the extent to which I'm just playing Civilisation II in my novels.

How have you reacted to adaptations of your work: The Crow Road on television, The Wasp Factory on stage and Espedair Street as a play for radio?

They've all been very good. I've been pleasantly surprised. And I suppose you can't get too precious about what happens to your work – or if you do, don't sell the rights.

What are you likely to be working on next?

I've no idea. Gosh, if only I knew that. I do a book a year and always work from October to the end of the year.

Are there any autobiographical elements in your work? People seem to speculate about The Crow Road and The Bridge.

I try to avoid autobiography as much as possible. I'd like my friends to keep speaking to me for one thing, and I have a better imagination than I have a memory, so it's easier for me to make things up than to report them. In The Crow Road, the feel of being in a big extended family came out, but I never had anything like the major disagreement that Prentice does with his dad. The Bridge was an alternate world story, what might things have been like if I'd gone for a proper career. But they aren't really autobiographical at all.

Is there a sense in which fiction is a form of exorcism for you?

Yes there is a bit of that. There's a sense in which it's insurance, like carrying an umbrella when it's not raining. It doesn't really work that way but that's the way it feels. You hope that if you imagine something really horrible it won't happen to you or your loved ones. It's not the most important element of my work.

You tackle a range of forms. What do you see as the unifying features of your work?

Oh God! I'm really not trying to be awkward here, but I really don't know. I guess that's what critics are for. It's almost impossible for me to stand back and see it. I enjoy plot and I enjoy ideas. The books I've written aren't character driven, my characters do as they're told. The plot is what is important, then the ideas and, for me, character is a poor third. I don't do themes, I just write what I feel like. I don't intellectualise about it too much.

Are you surprised at what readers do take from your books?

Constantly! Surprised isn't remotely strong enough, at times I'm bloody astounded. Sometimes I read what people say about my novels and I'm pleasantly surprised. I'm thinking: 'God, I'm cleverer than I thought'. But more often I think: 'How the fuck do you take that from this? I know I'm not supposed to tell you what your reaction to the book is meant to be, but how the hell can you possibly think this?' At times, people seem to be totally wrong-headed in their reactions to my novels. It's a constant source of amazement. •

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Published as Iain Banks:

The Wasp Factory (1984), Walking on Glass (1985), The Bridge (1986), Espedair Street (1987), Canal Dreams (1989), The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993), Whit (1995), A Song of Stone (1997).

Published as Iain M Banks:

Consider Phlebas (1987), The Player of Games (1988), Use of Weapons (1990), The State of the Art (1991), Against a Dark Background (1993), Feersum Endjinn (1994), Excession (1996), Inversions (1998).

More Iain Banks and Iain M Banks at The Edge:

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