Monkey's Blog - with a little help from Alice

Trying to catch up (1): Iain M Banks

Alice keeps putting off writing this post, because she knows she'll have to say something about the death of Iain Banks from cancer on June 9th, last Sunday. She was really quite upset (I say no more, to spare her embarrassment.) And so were thousands of others, too. See all the comments posted by fans and well wishers.

We thought he was going to have just a bit longer, before the big C finally ran its course. His latest and last novel, The Quarry, was brought forward for early publication, but not officially until June 20th. Still, he did get to see a preview copy. Even though the central character is a man dying of cancer, our novelist didn't actually know he himself had the disease until the whole book had already been fully planned and he was nine tenths of the way through the actual typing. His widow, Adele, pointed this out clearly on the Banksophilia website on June 14th. Early reviews are positive: see The Independent and The Guardian for example. Even though the book isn't by her favourite Iain M (Sci-fi) Banks, Alice will read it eventually, when it gets to be available in the Library, and / or comes out in paperback.

Iain Banks gave an amazing last TV interview to Kirsty Wark on BBC2. See quotes from it on the BBC News site. We watched it, tissues at the ready, and he seemed to us to be just the same old character we remembered from Edinburgh Book Festival events - with a fierce political stance (left, of course!) an atheist but optimistically humanist viewpoint (despite the despair of the Culture agent Diziet Sma in State of the Art) plus a naughty sense of humour and that familiar abrupt laugh.

The same characteristics come through in a final print interview with Stuart Kelly.

Some recent articles have focussed on the non-M mainstream novels, especially the brilliant and shocking Wasp Factory (Warning: there are spoilers on Wikipedia!) which was his publishing debut. However, Ken MacLeod, a friend and fellow Scottish writer of SciFi (whose novels Alice has also much enjoyed reading, by the way) has written an appreciation of his with-an-M work, and his supremely wonderful creation of the world of The Culture. Apparently IMB likened writing literary fiction to playing a piano, and writing SF to playing a vast church organ. Yes, sir! says I. [And Alice concurs, if not in bold...]

MacLeod also said: The personality that his fans can see through his writings is very as he was. He was exuberant, curious, compassionate and questioning. That's what he was like. (See the Scotsman article for quotes from other writers too.)

This uniquely talented writer will be sorely missed - but his books will continue to provoke and provide pleasure. See also our post below on 11th April, and the note at the end of  25th April.