Iain Banks, and books out windows.

The great Scottish author, leftie and all round good yin Iain (M) Banks died last week at the far-too-cruel an age of 59. Much has been made in the press of his wonderfully wry April announcement that he was dying of cancer ("I'm officially Very Poorly"), his contribution to literary and science fiction, and the fact he thought the Tories could well, the story about the monogrammed t-shirt is a lesson to any leftie writer who makes it big enough for the book circuit.

Everyone apart from me seems to have met him. Usually in a pub.

I confess right now that I didn't read that many of his books while he was alive. A couple of the Culture novels, a few of the ones without the M on the cover, some memorable lines from Complicity and Player of Games sticking out like silhouettes on my personal cultural landscape amid half-buried narratives. But there's one book for which is a big reason why I'm still writing and for which I always thought I owed the man both a pint and some therapists bills.

I wish I still had my original copy of The Wasp Factory, Banks' first published work that came out the year after I was born. That copy is riddled with yellow highlighter and the margins infected with note after note, written in sharp black propelling pencil. I haven't seen my first copy in about a decade, but I still remember the braille feel of those scraps of thoughts on nearly every one of the 184 pages (I'm including the pages with reviews and the title). It's The Book. You know, the one that you read that changes things.

As an English assignment in what was to be my last year of high school, we had to select a novel and write a critical essay on it. As one of those alienated weirdo kids who spent too much time in the library and who took English seriously, I used the two-page suggested book list like I was food shopping. In the space of two weeks I read voraciously, that little list opening me up to novels and authors that I didn't know existed. I inhaled Brave New World, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Periodic Table/If This Is A Man, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Of Mice and Men, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and, uh the collected thinkings of Whoopi Goldberg (it was called Book). I came out of this orgy of ideas, politics and stories of human deprivation feeling simultaneously inspired, angry, depressed and cynical, and that was before I read Whoopi.


However, none of these great works (and I've since re-read them all, apart from Book) really resonated with me enough that I thought I could write a 2000 word report on it (how word count expectations change, eh?). However, my travels through the adult literature section led me to the B's, and a slim black-bound paperback with a cover that looked like Nine Inch Nails albums sounded. I have a copy of the same edition now, and reading the cover blurb again takes me right back to the brown carpets and beige shelves of that public library in Scotland:

"Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my younger brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anyone in years and I don't intend to ever again.

"It was just a stage I was going through."

The moment when I saw the symbolism on the cover. Good god.

I read it in a day, sitting in a bright green box room. I remember it was a sunny afternoon when I read page 142, the sun low in the sky. I remember that because I vividly recall that the little black cover looked almost like a bird when I vehemently threw it across the room in horror on reading the end of the first paragraph (I just re-read it, hairs on my neck and bile in my throat rising in tandem).  Of the thousands of books I've read, that one paragraph is the only one to have caused me to react like I'd touched a live wire.

It wasn't just That Bit that caused The Wasp Factory to worm its way into my brain. I'd be doing the washing up years after the essay was written (top marks as you'd imagine; those notes in the margins were for something) and suddenly the image of a kite circling the world would fly across my peripheral vision. I'd look at the labels in my clothes and for a fleeting second consider cutting them out. For the first time in my life I realised the raw power of language and just what could be achieved with a well-timed punch to the medulla. Iain Banks succeeded where Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn failed as far as one sixteen year old was concerned, and whilst I'm sure the comparison would leave him laughing into his dram, I'd like to think he'd appreciate the sentiment.

So here's to you Iain, you taught me more in a novel that's scarcely longer than the introductory preamble to some of the Big Classics on my shelves, and you taught my while making me want to throw your book out a window after setting it on fire so it could never get back in the house again.

Frank Cauldhame would approve.

Speaking Ill of the Dead

“For 3 million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person” 
― Frankie Boyle

Unless you were hiding under the duvet in case of missiles from Pyongyang today you'll have caught the news that infamous Tory and hater of all humanity (at least, all humanity that lacked a vast fortune and a standing army) Margaret Thatcher has regrettably died peacefully in her sleep at the age of 87. I found out when I turned facebook on this morning to find a newsfeed of popped champagne corks, photos of street parties in Brixton and Glasgow, and various quotes like the ones above. It was the first Good Thing to happen on a day of Many Good Things (the others being personal victories, and worthy of a street party of one).

I confess to feeling slightly uneasy about the celebrations, despite joining in online and in person. There's a deep cultural idea of not speaking "ill of the dead", as though we've historically been terrified of a zombie attack where walking corpses are not out for brains but a desire to give you a ticking off for making some joke about the miner's strike.

One fantastic little response to the merriment popped up on an online dating website of all places, which crystallised this argument perfectly for me. After chucking up a really quite neutral status update there ("Margaret Thatcher is dead! What a way to start the day!") came this tremendous response from a young lady who shall remain nameless.

You know her family more so her grandchildren will be more affected over people rejoicing her death. Hate her sure rejoice a death she was not a monster

It was then that my internal moral-o-meter ticked into "Nah, fuck it". Glenn Greenwald in this brilliant piece for the Guardian makes the case that public figures are exempt from the traditional respect that would be awarded to friends and family members, and makes it better than me. But it got me thinking about the very idea of "speaking ill".

If you had come through abuse by a family member, famous or no, why should you hang back on fist-pumping the air when news of their demise reached your ears? If there was an individual who had caused you hurt, treated you without humanity, then why should you afford them any kind of respect once they'd died? I can think of one person (happily only one) who, upon discovering they have passed away, I intend on buying a bottle of something delicious and toasting him on his way to whatever hell my atheistic sensibilities will allow him. And I won't feel any shame about that. Why should I? My feelings of relief and joy will be just as valid as the feelings of grief others may feel. 

As for "Oh noes, the children", surely in that case there should be absolutely no opinion when someone famous dies? Say a famous man who secretly committed domestic violence, who terrorised his children and made their life hell, dies peacefully. The plaudits about what a wonderful man he is are plastered all over the media. Nothing but love for the man who caused them hurt. Sounds pretty horrendous for those who knew him personally, no? 

The woman committed abuses both at home and abroad. Almost everyone I know in Scotland was affected negatively by her actions and policies. She came to power before I was born but I grew up in a landscape shaped by her notions of fucking over the poor, greed being the only thing that mattered, and that community wasn't worth a damn. I'm still living in that landscape as those ideas are hard to shift.

So I'm going to feel good about the fact she's gone, and I'll do it without guilt. I'm going to sit around a table with friends and eat home-made food and raise a glass with a smile on my face that someone who stood for everything I don't is no longer with us.