Martyn Colebrook - The Transgressive Iain Banks: Essays on a Writer Beyond Borders

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

Katharine would like to dedicate this book to her Auntie Liz who, despite thinking Canal Dreams was likely to be a mucky book, bought her the remaining Iain Banks novels she was missing

MARTYN COLEBROOK, KATHARINE COX and DAVID HADDOCK

This collection focuses on the varied ctions of Iain (M.) Banks and the different domains of the imagination which he traverses and upon which he trespasses. As this collection demonstrates, Banks ction represents a continued fascination with the transgression of borders and limits, whether technical, cultural, corporeal, national or otherwise. In exploring these borders, the collection applies contemporary and innovative theory to the analysis of his ction with the result that these original essays offer new and insightful ways to consider his writing. The essays, all explicitly concerned with border crossing, are divided into four parts. These explore the Scottish context, in which connections with Alasdair Gray and Scottish politics are discussed in detail; the geographies of his writing, which explores space and place in his work; genre, which investigates the transgressive nature of his writing; and nally, gender, games and play, in which narrative and metactional strategies within Banks novels, particularly through analysis of the Culture, are examined.

Banks has established himself as one of the most inventive, experimental and prolic writers of his generation and yet, despite the innovation of his ideas and narratives, critical acclaim has been slow to respond. Over the course of his career, Banks work has been traditionally marginalized for a variety of reasons: these include the prominence of his early ction (especially his debut novel), which has tended to overshadow his later work; his decision to write and maintain himself as a science ction writer, which has drawn an uncertain response from literary critics; his geographical and political focus on niche Scottish concerns or, ironically, that his writing is too removed from such concerns.

Banks publishes two different styles of novel: mainstream, commercial ctions that sometimes focus on transformations of thriller genres and works of science or speculative ction which are usually set in his critical utopia, the Culture. These two outputs are published under different names, Iain Banks and Iain (M.) Banks, respectively. The naming of the author is explored throughout the collection, as the borders between the personae are often bridged and the differentiation between the two is overcome by the overlapping references, themes and motifs he uses between his work. Banks, then, is a novelist who has his own double, an author for whom the idea of a split writing persona is as emphatic as the articulation and presentation of the double motif in his work.

The strongest case for Banks bridging of genres and his eclectic inhabitation of the double domains of the high and low/popular and literary is to be made through an examination of his more recognizably mainstream ction and his science ction writing, the overlaps being sufciently evident for Thom Nairn to claim that his work outside the science-ction eld [...] is rarely far from its edges (Nairn 1993, 127). Duncan Petrie claims that Banks is a novelist who explores the conventions and limits of genre (Petrie 2004, 119) and his ability to operate comfortably in a multitude of different genres is also recognized by the reference to Banks as a ction factory (Nairn 1993: 127; see also March 2002: 81) (a term which recognizes both his prolic and commercially successful output). This idea of a ction factory positions Banks as the physical embodiment of Umberto Ecos concern (voiced about a text) that a writer become a machine for generating interpretations (Eco 1984). And perhaps there is something machine-like about Banks routine ability to produce bestsellers by compartmentalizing his year, writing roughly 3,000 words a day, eight hours a day, ve days a week, till the book [is] nished (Hughes 1999, n.p.). However, this is offset by his famously hedonistic lifestyle (which has been overhyped by both press and author alike). Banks is a writer who is often represented as having fun, whether that be indulging in his love of fast cars, classic whiskey (immortalized in his non-ction work Raw Spirit), drugs (up to about 2006), or women (hes recently talked about his adulterous period). However, hes also a very tricky novelist who is deliberately provocative; when discussing research for The Business (1999) and Look to Windward (2000), for example, he responded, I do as little as possible (Hunt 1999, n.p.). This metronomic ability to publish a book a year, usually alternating mainstream and science ction titles (Wilson 1994), coupled with their popularity and Banks own obvious and jokey enjoyment for what hes doing, has perhaps contributed to a smaller, non-unied and more critical reception than his work deserves.

This introduction offers an insight into Banks pre-publication writing, as well as a brief biographical summary before briey glossing the essays that follow.

Regarded as a shocking, visceral and disturbing entry into the world of contemporary British ction, The Wasp Factory (1984) gained a notorious response, which was signicant for its lack of unication. This mixed critical reaction included reviews ranging from astonishment to repulsion, from praise to derision. Among the detractors, Banks writing was referred to as juvenile (Craig, P. qtd. Banks 1984, ii) and even rubbish or a joke (Gimson qtd. Banks 1984, i). Using these scathing reviews as a marketing tool (especially those that highlighted the violence and the unpleasantness of the reading experience), editions of the novel incorporated these warnings as totems (rather like Franks sacrice poles) to pass by before beginning the novel. As a result, the novel quickly acquired and has kept, some twenty-ve years on, a cult status among its readers.

There is something uncanny about The Wasp Factory. It seems too comprehensive, too different and too fully-edged for a rst-time novelist, as exploring the pre-publication history of Banks demonstrates. The pre-publication and unpublished work of Banks is of major signicance in the study of his early published work. His career, in particular, has experienced a bifurcation in what he has described as his Y-shaped split. His juvenilia is as follows, and in the later pieces includes work that he would return to and nally publish: The Top of Poseidon (also referred to as the novella length rst draft of The Hungarian Lift-Jet), The Hungarian Lift-Jet, The Tashkent Rambler, Use of Weapons (1974), Against a Dark Background, The State of the Art (Culture novella), The Player of Games, The Wasp Factory, Consider Phlebas, Walking on Glass, O, The Bridge.

Like many writers, Iain Banks set his stall out to be a writer at an early age. while at school and then at university (often in science ction) he completed the rst draft of his breakthrough work, The WaspFactory, in 1980. Though he considered himself to be a science ction writer, and with his self-imposed deadline of being published by thirty fast approaching, he decided to write something more mainstream that he could send to a wider range of publishers. This decision was not arrived at lightly, as an author so committed to science ction there seems to be a part of him that considered it selling out (see Rundle 2010). Despite this new approach it took nearly three years and at least six publishers later before