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Ali Dale attempts to explore
Iain Banks's bottom line.
The revolutionary, the Che
Guevara of Scottish literature. It's an image that many would
dispute, not least the man himself. For though Iain Banks is
widely celebrated as a writer of gratuitously twisted stories,
with a parallel cult of sci-fi, less talked about are his
revolutionary vision and libertarian tendencies.
Devoted fans will recognise these
leanings from his sci-fi work, under the name Iain M Banks,
through his invention of The Culture, a "vaguely left-of-centre
Utopia with no money and no real laws." This futuristic
nirvana has become a major theme in Banks's sci-fi, and if his
soon to be published book, The Business is anything to go by, it
seems that the same ideals are becoming equally prominent in his
mainstream work.
The Business is described as:
"a dazzling exploration of capitalism, corporations and
corruption", three words that seem to go increasingly hand
in hand these days as one large corporation after another is
accused of unscrupulous labour policies or of causing large
scale environmental problems. In Complicity, Banks describes the
Thatcher regime as "the old vaguely socialist
inefficiencies replaced with more extreme capitalist ones, power
centralised, corruption institutionalised". So does Iain
relate to the rising tide of disillusionment. Is he confronting
the corporate state? How far does he empathise with the global
protest movement such as the World Trade Organisation and World
Bank protests ?
"I've got mixed feelings but
I guess I'm mostly pro the protesters. But even if libertarians
have their way, they might get rid of the State, but you'd be
left with something even more powerful and all-embracing and not
democratically, even potentially, accountable. Yet, I think our
present brand of capitalism leaves a lot to be desired."
The Culture gives us an insight
into Banks's concept of a Utopian state. In The Independent he
explained: "It's my secular heaven, the place I'd like to
live, my place over the rainbow. It's a place of universal
wealth and limitless sex and internally manufactured drugs,
where a virtual reality known as Infinite Fun Space means even
artificial intelligences get their kicks. In this conceptual
world, it becomes possible for a society of humanoids and
self-aware machines to evolve and spread in partnership
throughout the galaxy, circumstances which necessarily require a
mix of socialism, anarchy and determined hedonism."
"Briefly, nothing and nobody
in The Culture is exploited," he wrote in A Few Notes, his
1994 article on the Culture: "It is essentially an
automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes, with
human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from
play, or a hobby. No machine is exploited, either... Any job can
be automated in such a way as to ensure that it can be done by a
machine well below the level of potential consciousness. The
more things you own, the more responsibilities you have and the
ideal is to have no responsibilities by owning nothing so the
only value anything has is sentimental value. That obviously is
profoundly different to the idea of 'let's privatise
everything'," he adds.
Though the theme of rebellion, a
general 'smash the system' sentiment pervades much of his
writing, it turns out that the man himself had very little to
rebel against. "I was raised Church of Scotland and my dad
was an atheist. I never had that sort of religious repression
and I was very glad, when I talked to my friends, that I was
brought up a Protestant because it was easier to leave
Protestantism behind than it was to leave Catholicism
behind."
He writes for only two months
every year, usually in the winter, alternating between
mainstream and science fiction. For a self-confessed slacker he
has been fairly prolific over the years, producing a total of 17
novels including Complicity, A Song of Stone, Whit and The Crow
Road which was made into a four-part BBC 2 serial. Before the
success of The Wasp Factory he had a number of jobs, the last
one he describes in his on-line biography: "I found work in
London with a large firm of lawyers as a costing clerk, drawing
up narratives for enormous legal bills - arguably a good
grounding in fiction writing all by itself." And when
questioned about his 'wild man of Scottish literature'
reputation he admits, in the same biography, to "a very
limited and perfectly controlled traverse of the south face of
the Metropole Hotel in Brighton, at dawn one day during the '87
World Science Fiction Convention, a minor event which has been
completely blown out of all proportion ever since. So any
stories you hear about Spiderman outfits, abseiling, police
detention or a career as an international jewel thief can
probably be instantly dismissed."
Opening Complicity at random,
idly searching for the idealist in Iain Banks, I came across
this conversation,
"I wanted change… if there
was ever a popular uprising it wouldn't do any harm for there to
be people like me in the army who were basically in sympathy
with the movement."
"You're talking to somebody
who thought the way to make the world a better place was to
become a journalist."
I confess to him that my own urge
to write has its roots firmly in my banner-waving,
change-the-world tendencies, and wonder if this is also true of
him. He responds: "One of the things you set out to do is
to try and influence the world, no matter what you do in life,
that applies whether you are a nurse or a teacher or anything at
all. I think it depends on what kind of person you are. Some
people are just selfish and out for themselves. I'm sure there
are writers like that but I hope that most writers try to make
the World, even very, very slightly, a better place. Certainly,
a lot of us try to achieve that just by saying look, here's my
ideas, what do you think? If you don't like them, feel free to
ignore them, but at least they're in the public gaze. I guess
that any writer or journalist is trying to open the world up for
inspection."
I question whether there is a
crossover occurring between the messages in his mainstream
literature and his science-fiction."I'm not so sure that I
put messages in deliberately. The Culture books have a message
in a sense, albeit a buried one, it's implicit rather than
explicit, you know; the future might a) be okay, b) not be
inherently capitalist, but basically just better, more humane,
and in a way The Business might be edging towards that sort of
idea, although at a tangent. The Culture was around for a long
time before I started writing about it so, in a sense it hasn't
evolved too much, the basis of it, the thought behind it has
been very similar over the years, it's only details that really
evolve. I think there's a sense in which two of the mainstream
books, this one and A Song of Stone both might be creeping
closer to the science fiction but I wouldn't want to overstate
that."
Iain Bankshas achieved success at a reasonable age. Though he
started writing at 14 and completed his first novel at 16. His
first successful book The Wasp Factory, wasn't published until
1984 on his 30th birthday. The Irish Times judged it to be
"a work of unparalleled depravity". I assumed they
must be thinking of the bit when Frank gets up with a God-awful
hangover and his father, inhaling his fart, detects the whisky
and lager of the previous night's binge. Although the reader
subsequently discovers that he already knew this, being in
cahoots with the local landlord. "So, can you tell what
people have been drinking by smelling their farts?", I ask.
He laughs, "Happily no, that was made up, a comical
aside."
"So it wasn't based on someone you know?"
" No, no, I just had a vague idea that I wanted Frank to
feel slightly paranoid about his dad who had certain powers over
Frank and it just popped into my head that you could smell
somebody's farts and tell what they had been eating the night
before."
"Every teenager's worst nightmare?" I asked
"Exactly, that was probably where my mind was at the time -
what would really scare the hell out of Frank?"
I read Espedair Street when it
came out in 1987. I picked it up one night around 10pm and
finally put it down around 6 the next morning. It made me laugh
so much I fell off my bed three times. Looking back on it now,
it strikes me that it was very much a pre-Ecstacy culture book.
Does he think Irving Welsh has taken over where he left off?
"Yeah, we're talking about a different generation and a
different regime of drugs really, the whole ecstacy thing was a
surprise to me, I didn't really know about it, I certainly
couldn't have written about it the way that Irving Welsh did.
But yeah, I was very happy to hand over, if such a thing
existed, the crown of 'Scottish bad boy writerhood'. I hope it
was safe in my hands for a few years but I was quite pleased to
pass it over."
Does he ever find that his work
takes on a meaning that is more than the sum of the parts when
the finished thing finally comes together? "Well, it's not
really for me to say, I just write the damn things, what people
take from my books is up to them. My final word is the book
itself, I don't want to then have to produce study notes, that
would limit the possibilities for people to make up their own
minds about it. It's part of the process, letting it go and
letting it evolve. I hope that all the books are more than the
sum of their parts but it's something I can't be objective
about"
This is a man whose books
consistently hit the bestseller lists and who has a talent for
insightful humour. I came away wondering whether it is wise to
question the political undercurrents inherent in his work
considering he once ran for Rector of Edinburgh University under
the banner of the Drunken Bastard Party
The Business by Iain Banks is
due out on June 8 2000, published by Abacus in paperback at
£6.99.
copyright New Insight 2000
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