The Crow Road
by Iain Banks
Abacus paperback

“It was the day my grandmother exploded.” You have to admit it is an attention-grabbing first line, and it belongs to The Crow Road by Iain Banks. The thing is about Iain Banks is that he is two authors. As Iain M. Banks, he writes science fiction of a very particular kind about a political and social entity called The Culture which is spreading across the galaxy. But that is something I will come back to another time. As straightforward Iain Banks, he writes straightforward novels. Actually, that’s misleading. They are not straightforward at all. What I should say is that as Iain Banks, he writes complex novels which are not science fiction.

The Crow Road is the story of the McHoan family who live in the town of Gallanach, which Banks suggests lies some on the west coast of Argyll in Scotland. Gallanach was once a port where ships came from all over the world, but the trade is long gone and where the dock used to be luxury quayside apartments are being built. Employment these days is provided by high-tech industry – in the case of Gallanach, a specialist glass factory. The town’s main hotel is called “The Steam Packet”. There are whisky distilleries nearby. Whisky, indeed, plays an important part in life – especially during New Year celebrations. There is a loch where people fish for salmon and hillsides where they hunt deer. In short, it is an everyday west of Scotland town.

Most of the story is told by Prentice McHoan, who divides his time between university in Glasgow where he is studying history and the family home in Gallanach. Well, not precisely the family home – when he returns to Gallanach he usually stays with his Uncle Hamish because he has fallen out with his father over the existence (or non-existence) of God. Prentice’s father Kenneth McHoan began life as a schoolteacher but became a writer of children’s stories. Kenneth’s sister, Fiona, was married to the local laird, Fergus Urvill, who runs the employment-giving glass factory and lives in a castle, but she died, tragically, in a car accident. Kenneth and Fiona’s much younger brother, Rory, was also a writer, but he mysteriously disappeared some eight years before the story starts. The McHoans, it seems, are not a lucky family.

Or perhaps it is not just a matter of luck. Prentice’s grandmother, Margot, gives Prentice a sort of commission to find out exactly what is happening to their family – just a few days before she falls from a ladder while cleaning out the gutters, crashes through the conservatory roof and dies. And this leads Prentice on a journey through the family and social history of the McHoans and of the town of Gallanach.

What makes The Crow Road much more than a normal mystery is not just the array of eccentric and amusing characters – did I mention that Prentice’s brother, Lewis, is a stand up comedian and that his Uncle Hamish has invented a new personal religion? – but also the way in which Iain Banks plays with the structure of the narrative. He switches narrators and plays around with the sequence of events so that the interest and the tension build until we reach a very surprising conclusion.

Laurence Bristow-Smith
British Consul General