In the summer of 1991, I interviewed Iain Banks for an Edinburgh magazine. In the resulting article, I mentioned that his next book, which he had just finished writing, was to be called The Cruel Road. Oh dear. (I blame the cheap tape recorder I was using.) “To be honest,” he said of the heavy tome, “it was a bit of a slog. Glad it’s done.” He went on to explain that it was something of a departure for him; an ambitious but outwardly conventional Scottish family saga.
Much of the novel takes place in 1990, and follows Scottish student Prentice McHoan, and his large, and extremely eccentric, family. At the core of the story is McHoan’s attempt to discover what happened to his wayward uncle, Rory, who disappeared without trace years before. But the book departs from this main plot, jumping back at frequent intervals to explore the earlier lives of McHoan’s parents and aunts and uncles. It lends a strangely abstract quality to something supposedly conventional.
When the book was published in 1992, I devoured it in a weekend. At the time I recall being mildly disappointed by what seemed like a rather conceptually slight work; almost too conventional compared with the relentless gothic nastiness of the author’s notorious debut, The Wasp Factory, or the sheer imaginative triumph of his masterpiece The Bridge.
Reading it again, nearly a quarter of a century on (astonishing though that seems), is a very different experience. Like most of his books, it’s very much a novel of its time. Part of the main plot takes place against the backdrop of the Gulf war – which would have been going on as Banks wrote the book. He famously hated doing research, and his habit of using whatever was going on in the world at the time can feel lazy in some of his lesser works, such as Dead Air. In The Crow Road, it adds wonderful period texture; the passing references to Sony Walkmen, Lloyd Cole, Star Wars and even an early Apple computer impart a truly nostalgic flavour. And, first time around, I hadn’t really noticed the bizarre structure to the book; early on, the chronological mesh is rather daring, risking losing the unwary reader completely. The main narrative force, where Prentice attempts to solve the mystery of his uncle’s fate, only really builds up late on in the book.
On the minus side, one can see the first inklings of the tendency to pad things out which came to blight some of his later mainstream work; Banks’s fertile imagination meant that he could improvise very easily – Prentice’s brother’s standup comedy routines feel distinctly superfluous.
But the novel is something else; something that inevitably passed me by first time round. For Scottish people of my generation (roughly the same age as Prentice), it occupies a poignant place in space and time. We could see that the world we were going to live in would be very different from what had gone before – but at the same time we felt connected to and shaped by the peculiar traditions and values by which our parents and grandparents had lived.
So does it stand up to the test of time? Yes – it has matured nicely in the 25 years since it was brought into the world, and is worthy of being savoured like the many fine whiskies that appear in its pages.
