Raise a Glass

In the summer of 1987, a freshly minted graduate, I was down in London paying off student debt – a mercifully lightweight business back in those halcyon days of free university education and even maintenance grants for those who’d committed the grave neo-liberal sin of being born to parents of limited means.  That said, money was still tight – like a lot of aspiring writers, I’d not thought to gird myself with any kind of back-up career option and so was working the usual variegated series of jobs you see in so many author bios.  I was mostly broke as result, but still managing to have a pretty good time.  You know how it is.  After the comfort and confines of university, suddenly the whole rough world was out there for the tasting and I seemed to have an infinite amount of time to work through the menu.  I’d barely even scratched the surface of my twenties, everything was ahead of me.  Somehow, being broke didn’t put much of a dent in the wonder of it all.

It did, however, put a dent in my expenditure on books.  I didn’t get to buy them very often, and I never bought them new.  That wasn’t as crushing a blow as it might seem.  Charing Cross Road was full of musty second-hand bookshops back then, and I only lived a half hour walk away.  Didn’t even need to take the tube.

Then one day, I found myself making an exception to my vow of second-hand bookishness.  It was a novel I found in one of those grubby-glass-fronted independent bookshops still existing back then along the Tottenham Court road.  It had a curious, Soviet-realist derived front cover, a tumble of broadsheet accolades on the back and it lacked any kind of useful blurb.  I had no idea what it was actually about, so I opened it up and started to read.  About five minutes and a half dozen pages later, I carefully shuffled through the contents of my wallet, separated out the three pound notes (remember them?) that I needed and in an ecstasy of consumer guilt I paid for Iain Banks’ The Bridge, marched back to my (shared) room at UCL Halls of Residence, and read the book cover to cover that same afternoon.

I’d never read anything like it. It blew me away.

I sometimes think I’ve never read anything like it since.

Later that week, I lent The Bridge to my room-mate – read this, it’s fucking brilliant!! – went out and broke my vow again.  I bought everything this Banks guy had ever written.  Fortunately for my finances, that turned out to be only two other novels, The Wasp Factory and Walking On Glass.  They set me back another hard earned four pounds fifty, but when I paid this time I was clear-headed about what I was doing.  Whatever this guy wrote, I would read, as soon as I could lay my hands on it. Some luxuries are worth the sacrifice.  When Espedair Street came out, I got it in hardback.

Twenty five years later, I still own those books, the very same copies, and Iain Banks is dying.

It’s hard to communicate how that feels.  I only ever met Iain once, extremely briefly, and we barely exchanged hellos.  I don’t know him in any real sense.  But in just as real a sense, he’s been a constant companion throughout the last twenty five years.  Reading his books marked a lot of the major stages of my life.  I pre-ordered them at the British Council library when I worked my first ESL job in Ankara.  I evangelised about them to colleagues who, years away from the UK, had never heard of the man.  Back in London during the early nineties, I brandished them at friends and lovers as a powerfully human alternative to the smugly cold and clinical early fiction of Ian McEwan (Banks could go head to head with McEwan for atrocity and horror, but somehow an irrepressible humane and human warmth always soaked through the prose).   I lent them to my wife when we first met, with much the same words as I’d used to my room-mate seven years previously.  Her English wasn’t that great back then, and yet nineteen years on she still remembers The Wasp Factory and The Bridge as if she’d read them a couple of weeks ago.  Talking incessantly about them (along with Reservoir Dogs and the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge) was a significant supporting beam in the structure of our early relationship.  The way our feelings chimed over those books was an early indicator that, this time around, we might be playing for keeps.

Then there’s the direct literary influence – Banks was an early weapon for me in my secession from the po-faced literary establishment.  He was a bloody great broadsword of kinetic fictional prowess, pointing the way you could go if you weren’t up for this gnawing, angst-ridden navel-gazing the English literary scene seemed so wedded to at the time.  His books were about stuff, in a way that so much other so-called literary fiction of the period wasn’t.  Shit happened in them – violent, exciting, often silly, hilarious, fantastical shit.  Just as you could see the man’s human warmth underlying the prose, so you could detect a delight in fireworks on the page and daft jokes for their own sake.  No-one was less surprised than me to discover that the man was also writing outrageously sardonic wide-screen space opera.  I can still recall the smile that came to my lips when, reading Consider Phlebas on a plane back to a job in Istanbul, I first stumbled on the deadpan names of the Culture’s starcraft and what they implied about the Culture as a whole.  Later, I became a fully paid up devotee of the sardonic wit and black humour of those Minds, drones and other assorted dream machines.  Later still, that same sardonic black humour would creep in and tinge my own writing to no small extent.

Lastly, there’s the man himself.  As I said, I don’t know Iain in any real sense, but in all the conversations I’ve had with people who do, I have quite literally never heard anyone say a bad word about him.  Every single commentary has been either admiring or complimentary or both.  That’s no mean achievement in any walk of life, and in the nervy, gossipy world of authors, aspiring and published and their critics, it’s almost beyond belief.  I can’t think of a single other writer – a single other person, really – about whom I could say the same thing.  To rub so many people so thoroughly up the right way, you really do have to be a remarkably decent human being.

And then you read that personal statement linked to above, the die-hard gallows humour and utter lack of self-pity, and you realise that to remarkably decent you must also add unassumingly courageous and colossally strong.  And then you start to see where all those dynamic, powerful and ultimately humane fictional visions were drawn from over the years

We are not just going to lose a great writer this year, we are going to lose a great heart.  I only hope I have half the same heart and humour when my turn comes around.

So raise a glass, wherever you are, whoever you are.  To Iain Banks, the writer, the man.  Iain – I never knew you, and that was my loss.  But your writing etched the backdrop of the life I’ve lived so far, and you remain an example to the end.  All best wishes for all the time you have left.