‘I certainly haven’t mellowed – I’ve got angrier! I’m furious about Blair, who lead us almost single-handedly into an illegal, immoral war and then went on holiday with Silvio-fucking-Berlusconi. It gives you an insight into what it must have been like to live in Nazi Germany in the late ’20s and ’30s, to see a society go so completely wrongheadedly against morality and common sense. How the fuck do you expect young, alienated Muslim men to react?’ He doesn’t hold out high hopes for Gordon Brown, either, aside from the fact that ‘he’s not Blair – he doesn’t have this blood guilt. He’s intrinsically much more honest than Blair, but he’s still quite right wing.’
Banks is a very engaged novelist, refusing to be consumed by his work. He writes for only three months each year, typically between October and December, working a five-day week with weekends and evenings off. The rest of the time he devotes to an external life that includes motorbiking, hill-walking, making music and, recently, divorce. In print, he remains capable of expressing ideas so grotesque they genuinely shock, yet in person he’s the very model of humdrum geniality. Does he understand why some readers are fascinated by the apparent disparity between him and his books?
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‘People are always asking where I get my ideas from, but what kind of answer do they expect? There are facetious answers: a wee man in Auchtermuchty. Class A drugs. Fairies. God. But I maintain that writers get ideas from the same place as everybody else – it’s just that we get used to spotting them and we make more of them. I have an imagination that doesn’t have governors on it. It’s a clarity of vision of seeing the world the way it really is, and not pretending to yourself that it’s a deeply nice place. Nastiness happens. It’s just a recognition of that.’
These days, he occupies an interesting place in the literary landscape, too populist and compulsively kinetic, with his SF alter-ego and his rollicking yarns, to be as highly regarded as he might. Indeed, with his tendency for self-deprecation and dislike of over-analysis, there’s a sense that even he doesn’t take himself seriously enough. ‘I let the work speak for itself,’ he says. ‘You have a responsibility to make the work as good as you can, and that I take completely seriously, but in terms of that reflecting on me? I’m too proud to play that game. I think I’m better than a lot of people who think they have to adopt the persona of A Serious Writer. The whole seriousness of writing is overrated.’
Despite claiming that he’s ‘very, very happy having the freedom to write in two different genres’, there’s an indication that splitting his literary identity between mainstream novels and SF is beginning to limit the scope of his output. He regards ‘The Bridge’, written 20 years ago, as his best work; interestingly, it was the last one to contain elements of both mainstream fiction and SF. After that they went their separate ways.
‘But I am thinking of synthesising the two elements again,’ he reveals. ‘At one stage “Garbadale” was potentially going to be a book like that, although there’s no sign or trace of it left. The one after this, the next mainstream novel, I might try to do something a bit more tricky. But don’t hold me to it!’
‘The Steep Approach To Garbadale’ is published by Little, Brown at £17.99.
