Browse content similar to Iain Banks - Raw Spirit: A Review Show Special. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
Line | From | To | |
---|---|---|---|
This programme contains some strong language. | 0:00:02 | 0:00:06 | |
Beside one of Scotland's most dazzling creations, | 0:00:06 | 0:00:09 | |
lived one of the nation's most dazzling creative minds. | 0:00:09 | 0:00:12 | |
Iain Banks' home on the shores of the Firth of Forth | 0:00:14 | 0:00:17 | |
is where he wrote some of the most compelling fiction in a generation. | 0:00:17 | 0:00:21 | |
And it's where he was to face his own death from cancer. | 0:00:23 | 0:00:27 | |
This was his final interview. | 0:00:28 | 0:00:31 | |
It's been almost 30 years | 0:00:42 | 0:00:45 | |
since Iain Banks' remarkable debut, The Wasp Factory. | 0:00:45 | 0:00:48 | |
It marked him out as a major new talent. | 0:00:48 | 0:00:51 | |
Over the course of 29 books, | 0:00:51 | 0:00:53 | |
he created an extraordinary body of work, | 0:00:53 | 0:00:56 | |
with a very particular point of view. | 0:00:56 | 0:00:58 | |
He combined both critical acclaim and popular success. | 0:00:58 | 0:01:02 | |
His books are clever, controversial, funny, warm, political, | 0:01:02 | 0:01:06 | |
and astoundingly imaginative. | 0:01:06 | 0:01:08 | |
They reflect the personality of the man. | 0:01:08 | 0:01:12 | |
Usually with my male central characters, | 0:01:12 | 0:01:13 | |
they will be basically me, but in an idealised form, | 0:01:13 | 0:01:17 | |
ie, taller, handsomer, younger, | 0:01:17 | 0:01:20 | |
thinner of waist, | 0:01:20 | 0:01:21 | |
and more successful with the ladies. | 0:01:21 | 0:01:23 | |
Nowhere was the strength of that personality more evident | 0:01:26 | 0:01:30 | |
than in the blog he published in April. | 0:01:30 | 0:01:32 | |
He announced he was "officially very poorly", and had asked | 0:01:32 | 0:01:36 | |
his long-term girlfriend to "do him the honour of becoming his widow". | 0:01:36 | 0:01:40 | |
In Iain Banks' final novel, The Quarry, | 0:01:42 | 0:01:45 | |
one of the main characters is dying of cancer. | 0:01:45 | 0:01:48 | |
It's a visceral portrayal of a man furious at his approaching death. | 0:01:48 | 0:01:52 | |
Iain, "I am officially very poorly", that statement sounds like | 0:01:54 | 0:01:58 | |
the first line of an Iain Banks novel. | 0:01:58 | 0:02:01 | |
I suppose it does, actually. | 0:02:01 | 0:02:02 | |
And this idea that your novels are really like a hand grenade | 0:02:02 | 0:02:07 | |
and yet you were delivered of your own extraordinary hand grenade in your life. | 0:02:07 | 0:02:11 | |
Your first reaction to that was what? | 0:02:11 | 0:02:14 | |
I think it was on the lines of "Oh, bugger!" Um... | 0:02:14 | 0:02:20 | |
it's one of these things I guess in a sense you rehearse in your head. | 0:02:20 | 0:02:24 | |
I think anyone kind of does it. | 0:02:24 | 0:02:26 | |
You sort of game it, you play it, you think about how would I feel, | 0:02:26 | 0:02:29 | |
how would I react if, you know, a loved one is, well, dies | 0:02:29 | 0:02:33 | |
or is delivered of a verdict, | 0:02:33 | 0:02:36 | |
you know, prognosis like that, as it were. | 0:02:36 | 0:02:39 | |
And I think especially as a writer, | 0:02:39 | 0:02:40 | |
and I think probably within a greater field, actors are probably | 0:02:40 | 0:02:44 | |
the same when you have to take on | 0:02:44 | 0:02:48 | |
the part of someone who's dying or dead, | 0:02:48 | 0:02:50 | |
well, you know, if you're writing about people who are facing death | 0:02:50 | 0:02:55 | |
and you automatically, you kind of have to embody that. | 0:02:55 | 0:02:57 | |
You have to take that in quite seriously. | 0:02:57 | 0:02:59 | |
And obviously there are professions that are very much involved | 0:02:59 | 0:03:02 | |
with death, you know, funeral directors and so on | 0:03:02 | 0:03:04 | |
and people in A&E and, you know, ambulance drivers and so on, | 0:03:04 | 0:03:09 | |
you know the paramedics that come with the ambulance. | 0:03:09 | 0:03:12 | |
I think you'll probably find a preponderance of people like that | 0:03:12 | 0:03:16 | |
who are sort of pre-prepared, | 0:03:16 | 0:03:18 | |
or as pre-prepared as you can be with your reaction. | 0:03:18 | 0:03:22 | |
And I just took it as just, you know, bad luck, basically. | 0:03:22 | 0:03:25 | |
It did strike me almost immediately, | 0:03:25 | 0:03:27 | |
my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought, hah! | 0:03:27 | 0:03:30 | |
If I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, "Why me, God? | 0:03:30 | 0:03:33 | |
"What have I done to deserve this?" | 0:03:33 | 0:03:36 | |
Don't know why I turned into a Jewish person there, but never mind. | 0:03:36 | 0:03:39 | |
And I thought at least I'm free of that, at least I can simply, | 0:03:39 | 0:03:43 | |
you know, sort of treat it as bad luck and get on with it. | 0:03:43 | 0:03:46 | |
Humour has been at the heart... | 0:03:46 | 0:03:48 | |
Very very black humour has been at the heart of so much of your work. | 0:03:48 | 0:03:52 | |
I mean, does it help you get through different stages of this, | 0:03:52 | 0:03:57 | |
just finding the humour in things? | 0:03:57 | 0:03:59 | |
I guess so. It's not something you kind of do deliberately. | 0:03:59 | 0:04:01 | |
I guess it's just there, it's an automatic reaction, and yes, | 0:04:01 | 0:04:04 | |
obviously, with the loss factor, you go right back to the start. | 0:04:04 | 0:04:07 | |
That was, you know, it was always meant to be a black comedy, | 0:04:07 | 0:04:10 | |
that was very much the idea, and I... | 0:04:10 | 0:04:13 | |
I occasionally get asked, if I could be a character in one of my novels, | 0:04:15 | 0:04:18 | |
you know, who would it be? | 0:04:18 | 0:04:20 | |
There's quite a limited choice, | 0:04:20 | 0:04:21 | |
given the rather unpleasant ends that some of them come to. | 0:04:21 | 0:04:24 | |
You wrote The Quarry thinking it would be coming out this October or so forth | 0:04:24 | 0:04:30 | |
and they're rushing it out, so tell me a bit about the writing of The Quarry. | 0:04:30 | 0:04:34 | |
Well, it's, um... The narrator is an 18-year-old boy | 0:04:34 | 0:04:37 | |
who's on one or two different spectra, as it were, | 0:04:37 | 0:04:40 | |
possibly Asperger's being one of them. | 0:04:40 | 0:04:43 | |
But in a sense the main character's his dad who's dying of cancer. | 0:04:43 | 0:04:46 | |
Ha-ha! Ho-ho! | 0:04:46 | 0:04:48 | |
But I was 87,000 words into the book before I discovered the bad news. | 0:04:48 | 0:04:53 | |
I had no inkling, so it wasn't as though this is a response | 0:04:53 | 0:04:57 | |
to the condition, to the disease or anything, | 0:04:57 | 0:05:00 | |
and the book had been kind of ready to go. | 0:05:00 | 0:05:03 | |
And then 10,000 words from the end, as it turned out, | 0:05:03 | 0:05:07 | |
I suddenly discovered that I had cancer. | 0:05:07 | 0:05:09 | |
I've really got to stop doing my research too late. | 0:05:09 | 0:05:11 | |
This is such a bad idea. | 0:05:11 | 0:05:13 | |
You're 87,000 words into The Quarry then, and what changed | 0:05:13 | 0:05:16 | |
after your diagnosis in the writing and the revision? | 0:05:16 | 0:05:20 | |
Well, the first thing I did, I'd taken my laptop | 0:05:20 | 0:05:23 | |
when I first got the original bad news, as it were, in Kirkcaldy | 0:05:23 | 0:05:27 | |
in the Victoria Hospital and I'd taken my laptop in | 0:05:27 | 0:05:31 | |
just to...just thought I might do a bit of work while I was there. | 0:05:31 | 0:05:35 | |
And I couldn't really be bothered. | 0:05:35 | 0:05:37 | |
I'd basically done my work, my words for the day anyway, | 0:05:37 | 0:05:39 | |
so, having got this news, I sat in bed and I wrote - | 0:05:39 | 0:05:47 | |
there's a bit where Guy says, "I shall not be upset | 0:05:47 | 0:05:51 | |
"to leave this stupid bloody country and this idiotic, bloody human race | 0:05:51 | 0:05:55 | |
"and this idiotic world" and the rest of it, it's a proper rant. | 0:05:55 | 0:05:59 | |
I think it kind of changed places. | 0:05:59 | 0:06:01 | |
Originally it was exactly where I got the news, it was exactly 87,000. | 0:06:01 | 0:06:07 | |
It was changed slightly because my editor said, yes, it'd actually | 0:06:07 | 0:06:11 | |
be more powerful in the sort of address on camera that he does, | 0:06:11 | 0:06:16 | |
the recording, so we changed that. | 0:06:16 | 0:06:19 | |
"And I shall not miss being part of a species lamentably ready | 0:06:19 | 0:06:24 | |
"to resort to torture, rape and mass murder | 0:06:24 | 0:06:28 | |
"just because some other poor fucker or fuckers | 0:06:28 | 0:06:32 | |
"is or are slightly different from | 0:06:32 | 0:06:35 | |
"those intent upon doing such harm, | 0:06:35 | 0:06:38 | |
"be it because they happen to worship | 0:06:38 | 0:06:41 | |
"a very slightly different set of superstitious idiocies, | 0:06:41 | 0:06:45 | |
"possess skin occupying a non-identical position | 0:06:45 | 0:06:49 | |
"on a pan-tone racial colour wheel, | 0:06:49 | 0:06:51 | |
"or had the fucking temerity to pop out of a womb | 0:06:51 | 0:06:55 | |
"on the other side of a river, ocean, mountain range, | 0:06:55 | 0:06:59 | |
"other major geographical feature, or, indeed, just a straight line | 0:06:59 | 0:07:05 | |
"drawn across the desert by some bored and ignorant bureaucrat | 0:07:05 | 0:07:11 | |
"umpteen thousand miles away and a century ago. | 0:07:11 | 0:07:16 | |
"None of these things shall I miss. | 0:07:16 | 0:07:20 | |
"Frankly, it's a relief to be getting shot of the necessity | 0:07:20 | 0:07:24 | |
"of watching such bollocks play out. | 0:07:24 | 0:07:27 | |
"I would still rather have the choice, mark you, | 0:07:27 | 0:07:30 | |
"but, as this would appear to be being denied me, | 0:07:30 | 0:07:34 | |
"I am making the best of a bad job and looking on the bright side - | 0:07:34 | 0:07:40 | |
"I shall be free, at last, of that nagging, persistent sensation | 0:07:40 | 0:07:46 | |
"that I am, for the most part, surrounded by fucking idiots." | 0:07:46 | 0:07:53 | |
It just seems uncanny that you should be writing | 0:07:53 | 0:07:56 | |
a book about terminal cancer as you were given a diagnosis. | 0:07:56 | 0:07:59 | |
Not only that, only Iain Banks could get the diagnosis, | 0:07:59 | 0:08:03 | |
sit with his laptop and write about it there and then. | 0:08:03 | 0:08:06 | |
Oh, no, I disagree. | 0:08:06 | 0:08:07 | |
I think perhaps the majority of writers would do that. | 0:08:07 | 0:08:12 | |
In the hospital with your laptop? | 0:08:12 | 0:08:14 | |
It was there, you know, I was sort of - bugger! | 0:08:14 | 0:08:18 | |
So you do have to, you know, I think it's a natural thing | 0:08:18 | 0:08:21 | |
for a writer just to express themselves. | 0:08:21 | 0:08:23 | |
You might not do it with the idea of immediate inclusion into the novel | 0:08:23 | 0:08:27 | |
if that's what you're working on or whatever | 0:08:27 | 0:08:30 | |
but because... I think it was just coincidence, you know. | 0:08:30 | 0:08:33 | |
I think it was just the way things worked | 0:08:33 | 0:08:36 | |
that I happened to have chosen that subject. | 0:08:36 | 0:08:39 | |
Let's just go back to The Wasp Factory for a minute | 0:08:39 | 0:08:42 | |
and from the very get-go, you talk about it as a black comedy, | 0:08:42 | 0:08:47 | |
but it's a deeply moving book as well about a twisted childhood. | 0:08:47 | 0:08:51 | |
Oh, yeah, it's meant to basically press as many buttons | 0:08:51 | 0:08:55 | |
as is possible and kind of cheerfully going for | 0:08:55 | 0:08:59 | |
the Grand Guignol, you know, sort of feel as well. | 0:08:59 | 0:09:02 | |
It was an extraordinary...I mean, it was your first published novel. | 0:09:02 | 0:09:05 | |
-Absolutely. -And it absolutely... That was a hand grenade. | 0:09:05 | 0:09:08 | |
It certainly worked and I'm still very proud of it. | 0:09:08 | 0:09:10 | |
There's none of the books that I'm not proud of. | 0:09:10 | 0:09:13 | |
There's ones I think I could have done better with. | 0:09:13 | 0:09:15 | |
I still think Canal Dreams is the runt of the litter | 0:09:15 | 0:09:18 | |
but, yeah, I'm still very very proud of The Wasp Factory | 0:09:18 | 0:09:23 | |
and it was... You were saying earlier about The Quarry, | 0:09:23 | 0:09:26 | |
I realised as I was sitting there those couple of days | 0:09:26 | 0:09:29 | |
coming up with the ideas that this is looking a bit like Wasp Factory. | 0:09:29 | 0:09:34 | |
I thought, well, that's OK. | 0:09:34 | 0:09:35 | |
You're allowed to have themes, you're not just always just repeating yourself | 0:09:35 | 0:09:39 | |
if you have similarities between your novels. | 0:09:39 | 0:09:41 | |
And I kind of just liked the idea of playing around with that | 0:09:41 | 0:09:44 | |
and about the father/son relationship and... | 0:09:44 | 0:09:47 | |
But I mean, there's a bit, | 0:09:47 | 0:09:48 | |
you can almost see the workings in The Quarry. | 0:09:48 | 0:09:53 | |
-Yeah, you know what I mean. -Yeah. | 0:09:53 | 0:09:55 | |
When Kit talks about this thing about he's got, about trying | 0:09:55 | 0:09:59 | |
to measure people accurately, and one of the methods he resorts to | 0:09:59 | 0:10:04 | |
is wandering into the room at night when they're asleep and trying | 0:10:04 | 0:10:07 | |
to measure them and how frustrating it is and almost nobody's stretched, | 0:10:07 | 0:10:11 | |
lies stretched out like that, and everybody sort of curls up. | 0:10:11 | 0:10:15 | |
But he goes through some pain to say, "But it's not like | 0:10:15 | 0:10:19 | |
"I'm a mad axe murderer or anything," and that was almost there | 0:10:19 | 0:10:21 | |
just because of the Wasp Factory, so you're reassured that Kit... | 0:10:21 | 0:10:25 | |
-Kit's not going to be bumping people off. -Not murderous. | 0:10:25 | 0:10:28 | |
No, Kit's not, Kit's a wonderful, gentle human being, but then, | 0:10:28 | 0:10:31 | |
just going into some of the kind of set pieces in The Wasp Factory, | 0:10:31 | 0:10:35 | |
I mean, the death of Esmeralda. | 0:10:35 | 0:10:37 | |
I mean...extraordinary because you loved kites as well, didn't you? | 0:10:37 | 0:10:42 | |
Oh, yeah, I used to make my own kites and it was... | 0:10:42 | 0:10:45 | |
Used to...got big black bin liners and tape them to canes | 0:10:45 | 0:10:49 | |
and take them up to the hills above Greenock and fly them. | 0:10:49 | 0:10:53 | |
So I just remember, a good old windy day in Inverclyde | 0:10:53 | 0:11:00 | |
and going, "Bloody hell!" | 0:11:00 | 0:11:02 | |
Almost getting pulled off my feet, and I thought, if you were lighter, | 0:11:02 | 0:11:05 | |
if you were a child, you would be pulled off your feet and thought, hmm, really? | 0:11:05 | 0:11:09 | |
And because I, you know, from way back there, I still wanted, | 0:11:09 | 0:11:12 | |
that was always my ambition, to be a writer, you just think, | 0:11:12 | 0:11:15 | |
well, that's a way to kill somebody off if they're quite small. | 0:11:15 | 0:11:19 | |
Esmeralda looked round one last time at me, | 0:11:20 | 0:11:24 | |
giggling, and I laughed back. | 0:11:24 | 0:11:28 | |
Then I let the lines go. | 0:11:28 | 0:11:32 | |
The winch hit her in the small of the back and she yelped. | 0:11:33 | 0:11:36 | |
Then she was dragged off her feet as the lines pulled her | 0:11:37 | 0:11:42 | |
and the loops tightened around her wrists. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:46 | |
I staggered back, partly to make it look good | 0:11:46 | 0:11:49 | |
on the off-chance there was somebody watching | 0:11:49 | 0:11:53 | |
and partly because letting go of the winch had put me off balance. | 0:11:53 | 0:11:59 | |
I fell to the ground as Esmerelda left it forever. | 0:11:59 | 0:12:06 | |
The kite just kept snapping and flapping and flapping and snapping | 0:12:08 | 0:12:13 | |
and it hauled the girl off the earth and into the air, winch and all. | 0:12:13 | 0:12:19 | |
I lay on my back and watched it for a second, | 0:12:21 | 0:12:25 | |
then got up and ran after her as fast as I could, | 0:12:25 | 0:12:29 | |
again just because I knew I couldn't catch her. | 0:12:29 | 0:12:34 | |
She was screaming and waggling her legs for all she was worth, | 0:12:34 | 0:12:40 | |
but the cruel loops of nylon had her about the wrists, | 0:12:40 | 0:12:44 | |
the kite was in the jaws of the wind, | 0:12:44 | 0:12:47 | |
and she was already well out of reach | 0:12:47 | 0:12:51 | |
even if I had wanted to catch her. | 0:12:51 | 0:12:55 | |
I ran and ran, jumping off a dune and rolling down its seaward face, | 0:12:55 | 0:13:02 | |
watching the tiny struggling figure being hoisted | 0:13:02 | 0:13:06 | |
farther and farther into the sky as the kite swept her away. | 0:13:06 | 0:13:11 | |
'Childhood, often fraught and damaged, | 0:13:19 | 0:13:21 | |
'plays a central role in Iain Banks' stories.' | 0:13:21 | 0:13:25 | |
By contrast, his own was very happy, | 0:13:25 | 0:13:27 | |
and mostly spent here in North Queensferry, | 0:13:27 | 0:13:30 | |
and it's where he returned to live almost 20 years ago. | 0:13:30 | 0:13:35 | |
This was a great place to grow up. | 0:13:35 | 0:13:37 | |
Even if I'd only had indifferent parents, | 0:13:37 | 0:13:39 | |
your average parents, it was such an adventure playground. | 0:13:39 | 0:13:44 | |
There was even more of the military stuff left around, you know, | 0:13:44 | 0:13:48 | |
First World War emplacements | 0:13:48 | 0:13:50 | |
and Second World War anti-aircraft gun emplacements. | 0:13:50 | 0:13:53 | |
It was just a great place to wander round. | 0:13:53 | 0:13:56 | |
It's almost an island, it's got that lovely self-contained feel about it. | 0:13:56 | 0:14:00 | |
Just three-quarters of an island, you know, this wee peninsula, | 0:14:00 | 0:14:04 | |
but for the scale of a child it was absolutely perfect. It seemed huge. | 0:14:04 | 0:14:08 | |
And there was something inevitable that you'd have to use the bridge | 0:14:08 | 0:14:12 | |
-in your fiction? -I think so, yeah. | 0:14:12 | 0:14:14 | |
It was, it's one of the... | 0:14:14 | 0:14:16 | |
Almost, yeah, the only book I did that came to me in a dream. | 0:14:16 | 0:14:19 | |
I just had this dream. | 0:14:19 | 0:14:21 | |
I was living in Faversham in Kent at the time, | 0:14:21 | 0:14:23 | |
and I had this dream about a gigantic version of the bridge, | 0:14:23 | 0:14:26 | |
of this bridge, | 0:14:26 | 0:14:28 | |
just on a different scale and the size of a city, in a sense, | 0:14:28 | 0:14:33 | |
and I just woke up thinking, right, oh that's cool, that's nice. | 0:14:33 | 0:14:39 | |
Be nice if all the books came that way, totally effortless. | 0:14:39 | 0:14:42 | |
If he'd had less than the legal limit to drink | 0:14:44 | 0:14:48 | |
he would take the Quattro out | 0:14:48 | 0:14:50 | |
and drive to North Queensferry to sit beneath the great dark bridge, | 0:14:50 | 0:14:55 | |
listening to the water lap against the stones and the trains rumble overhead. | 0:14:55 | 0:15:01 | |
He would smoke a joint or just breathe the fresh air. | 0:15:01 | 0:15:04 | |
If he felt pity for himself, it was only one timid, tentative | 0:15:06 | 0:15:11 | |
part of his mind that felt so. | 0:15:11 | 0:15:13 | |
There was another part of him which seemed like a hawk or an eagle, | 0:15:13 | 0:15:20 | |
hungry and cruel and fanatically keen-eyed. | 0:15:20 | 0:15:24 | |
Self-pity lasted a matter of seconds in the open. | 0:15:24 | 0:15:29 | |
Then the bird of prey fell on it, tearing it, ripping it. | 0:15:29 | 0:15:34 | |
The bird was the real world, | 0:15:35 | 0:15:39 | |
a mercenary dispatched by his embarrassed conscience, | 0:15:39 | 0:15:43 | |
the angry voice of all the people in the world, that vast majority | 0:15:43 | 0:15:48 | |
who were worse off than he was - just common sense. | 0:15:48 | 0:15:53 | |
He discovered, to his knowing, almost righteous dismay, that the bridge | 0:15:55 | 0:16:01 | |
was not painted end-to-end over a neat three-year period. | 0:16:01 | 0:16:06 | |
It was done piecemeal, | 0:16:06 | 0:16:09 | |
and the cycle lasted anything between four and six years. | 0:16:09 | 0:16:14 | |
Another myth bites the dust, he thought - par for the course. | 0:16:14 | 0:16:21 | |
I think it had been such a large part of my life for so long, | 0:16:23 | 0:16:25 | |
it was this gigantic symbol that had affected me in all sorts of ways. | 0:16:25 | 0:16:30 | |
I think it's also there in the science fiction. | 0:16:30 | 0:16:33 | |
I've just always liked big structures, you know! | 0:16:33 | 0:16:37 | |
When you root some of your work in Scotland, | 0:16:37 | 0:16:40 | |
that's one part of your imagination. | 0:16:40 | 0:16:43 | |
The other part of your imagination's creating completely different worlds, for example the Culture, | 0:16:43 | 0:16:48 | |
this kind of slightly very sarcastic kind of supergroup, as it were, | 0:16:48 | 0:16:53 | |
-that kind of fly round the universe sorting things out. -Uh-huh. | 0:16:53 | 0:16:57 | |
You like the idea of creating different worlds? | 0:16:57 | 0:17:01 | |
I love it, yeah. | 0:17:01 | 0:17:02 | |
There's an enormous freedom that you get in science fiction | 0:17:02 | 0:17:05 | |
that you can just, you can go anywhere and do anything. | 0:17:05 | 0:17:08 | |
It's that simple. | 0:17:08 | 0:17:09 | |
The things that I love and things that I tend to read most | 0:17:09 | 0:17:14 | |
are science fiction and, you know, mainstream literature. | 0:17:14 | 0:17:17 | |
And those are what I love to write as well. | 0:17:17 | 0:17:20 | |
And it's been a privilege in a way to be able to get away with it, | 0:17:20 | 0:17:24 | |
you know, for an entire career, be able to do both. | 0:17:24 | 0:17:27 | |
But is the idea behind The Culture | 0:17:27 | 0:17:31 | |
to imagine a world that you think, in a way, would be better? | 0:17:31 | 0:17:37 | |
Yes, oh, it's didactic. | 0:17:37 | 0:17:39 | |
It's my idea of what is as close as possible, | 0:17:39 | 0:17:43 | |
as close as possible to anything remotely like us, | 0:17:43 | 0:17:47 | |
as a species, could get to in terms of being, if not an actual utopia | 0:17:47 | 0:17:51 | |
then a sort of functioning, as good as we're going to get utopia. | 0:17:51 | 0:17:55 | |
Having said that, I think that, | 0:17:55 | 0:17:57 | |
I don't think humanity is up to it, quite frankly. | 0:17:57 | 0:17:59 | |
I think we're too nasty. | 0:17:59 | 0:18:01 | |
We may find that there are genes that code for xenophobia. | 0:18:01 | 0:18:06 | |
Well, there are genes that code for, you know, racism | 0:18:06 | 0:18:11 | |
and sexism, for, you know, anti-Semitism, | 0:18:11 | 0:18:15 | |
for Islamophobia, all the xenophobic things, all the things | 0:18:15 | 0:18:19 | |
where we decide that we're this, we're one good privileged group and | 0:18:19 | 0:18:23 | |
those bastards over there, well, we hate them. | 0:18:23 | 0:18:26 | |
And all the excuses that we found, | 0:18:26 | 0:18:28 | |
we find, you know, to be so deeply, deeply unpleasant each other. | 0:18:28 | 0:18:32 | |
On Earth, one of the things that a large proportion of the locals | 0:18:32 | 0:18:38 | |
is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, | 0:18:38 | 0:18:44 | |
with a sureness and certainty | 0:18:44 | 0:18:46 | |
so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears | 0:18:46 | 0:18:50 | |
some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either | 0:18:50 | 0:18:54 | |
thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, | 0:18:54 | 0:19:01 | |
space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily | 0:19:01 | 0:19:07 | |
away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. | 0:19:07 | 0:19:15 | |
Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often | 0:19:15 | 0:19:21 | |
harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take | 0:19:21 | 0:19:26 | |
years and generations to manifest themselves. | 0:19:26 | 0:19:30 | |
Are you a kind of evangelising atheist in your work? | 0:19:30 | 0:19:34 | |
I've been describing myself as an evangelical atheist | 0:19:34 | 0:19:37 | |
for about 20 years, yes. | 0:19:37 | 0:19:38 | |
It's not enough to be sitting in the corner going, | 0:19:38 | 0:19:41 | |
well, I know I'm right, I'm not going to tell anybody else. | 0:19:41 | 0:19:44 | |
No, no, you have to, you have to go up to people's doors almost. | 0:19:44 | 0:19:47 | |
Have you discovered the power of atheism, brother? | 0:19:47 | 0:19:51 | |
Much more effective. | 0:19:51 | 0:19:52 | |
But what about, you don't... | 0:19:52 | 0:19:54 | |
There's a tiny bit of agnosticism in there on the basis that | 0:19:54 | 0:19:57 | |
if you think there are other lives on other planets, | 0:19:57 | 0:19:59 | |
I seem to remember you said something, | 0:19:59 | 0:20:01 | |
"Damn, there might just be a God out there playing a trick on us." | 0:20:01 | 0:20:04 | |
Oh, could be, there has to be a sort of | 0:20:04 | 0:20:06 | |
half a percent of, you know, of agnosticism in there | 0:20:06 | 0:20:09 | |
just because you just never know. | 0:20:09 | 0:20:11 | |
In a sense, because it seems so blatantly bloody obvious | 0:20:11 | 0:20:15 | |
that there is no God and it's all just another nonsense | 0:20:15 | 0:20:18 | |
so it's just, it's us expressing ourselves. | 0:20:18 | 0:20:21 | |
And as I'm saying in that piece about basing our fears and hopes and | 0:20:21 | 0:20:25 | |
so on, that, well, you know it could just be some gigantic cosmic joke. | 0:20:25 | 0:20:30 | |
But like Christopher Hitchens, are you anti-theist? | 0:20:30 | 0:20:34 | |
Do you think that religion is actually actively evil? | 0:20:34 | 0:20:37 | |
Not necessarily, and certainly not all the time. | 0:20:37 | 0:20:40 | |
It is a comfort to people, apart from anything else, you know. | 0:20:40 | 0:20:43 | |
But you'd say a false comfort? | 0:20:43 | 0:20:45 | |
Yeah, but again, I keep coming back to the fact I could be wrong. | 0:20:45 | 0:20:49 | |
And it's hard to know what else you'd put in place. | 0:20:49 | 0:20:52 | |
In the end, I would love to see religion just wither away | 0:20:52 | 0:20:55 | |
and, you know, just kind of be so exposed to reason | 0:20:55 | 0:20:59 | |
and to rationality that it would simply cease to be. | 0:20:59 | 0:21:04 | |
Or it would be very much a minority sport, as it were. | 0:21:04 | 0:21:07 | |
But as actually evil, well, it can be, yes. | 0:21:07 | 0:21:11 | |
I mean, it can certainly be. | 0:21:11 | 0:21:13 | |
Evil's such a...kind of an all or nothing word, isn't it? | 0:21:13 | 0:21:16 | |
-Mm-hmm. -Yes, it can be, you know but I mean it turned out | 0:21:16 | 0:21:19 | |
so could communism as well, for that matter, you know. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:22 | |
There's terrible crimes against humanity committed in its name. | 0:21:22 | 0:21:26 | |
It was supposed to be all about people, not about religion at all. | 0:21:26 | 0:21:29 | |
Do you believe in moral progress | 0:21:29 | 0:21:32 | |
or are we in an arrested phase at the moment? | 0:21:32 | 0:21:34 | |
I think the clutch is slipping at the moment, put it that way. | 0:21:34 | 0:21:38 | |
I believe in moral progress, yes, of course. | 0:21:38 | 0:21:41 | |
I mean, Steven Pinker wrote, I can't remember the name of the book now | 0:21:41 | 0:21:44 | |
but I think we are gradually doing better. | 0:21:44 | 0:21:48 | |
Fewer people are dying despite all the mayhem | 0:21:48 | 0:21:50 | |
and the horribleness of which we see so much nowadays. | 0:21:50 | 0:21:54 | |
Because of the media bringing it right to you. | 0:21:54 | 0:21:56 | |
You know, we are killing fewer of ourselves | 0:21:56 | 0:21:59 | |
so, yeah, there's moral progress. We've still got a way to go. | 0:21:59 | 0:22:02 | |
You know, I'm not sure we're getting much more | 0:22:02 | 0:22:04 | |
than a C on the report card but absolutely, | 0:22:04 | 0:22:07 | |
yes, of course there's moral progress. | 0:22:07 | 0:22:10 | |
Music's been a real importance to you in your, in your life. | 0:22:10 | 0:22:14 | |
I mean, lots of people would say that but for you particularly | 0:22:14 | 0:22:16 | |
because you can listen to music when you write and so forth. | 0:22:16 | 0:22:20 | |
And has that been something that's given you solace just now? | 0:22:20 | 0:22:24 | |
I think the solace is going to come because I write music, you know. | 0:22:24 | 0:22:29 | |
I've pretensions towards being a composer. | 0:22:29 | 0:22:33 | |
And that's what I intend to spend most of my creative | 0:22:33 | 0:22:35 | |
energies on in the next couple of months or however long I've got, | 0:22:35 | 0:22:38 | |
is writing music and trying to get it to some | 0:22:38 | 0:22:41 | |
level of presentability so that should be accessible. | 0:22:41 | 0:22:43 | |
Until now, this had been a private pastime for Iain, | 0:22:43 | 0:22:48 | |
but he was ready to share it. | 0:22:48 | 0:22:50 | |
So this is the symphony wot I wrote and I'm, | 0:22:50 | 0:22:53 | |
well, I'm still slightly in the course of writing | 0:22:53 | 0:22:56 | |
because it needs further tinkering with because it's such a long piece. | 0:22:56 | 0:23:01 | |
There's always more you can do, it's a bit like a novel. | 0:23:01 | 0:23:03 | |
A short story can be completely finished, | 0:23:03 | 0:23:06 | |
-a novel in a sense can always be tinkered with. -Look at that! | 0:23:06 | 0:23:08 | |
It looks so different from everything else. | 0:23:08 | 0:23:10 | |
-God, it looks so complex. -Well that's because it is. | 0:23:10 | 0:23:13 | |
HE LAUGHS | 0:23:13 | 0:23:14 | |
MUSIC PLAYS | 0:23:14 | 0:23:16 | |
This is the start of the second movement. | 0:23:27 | 0:23:29 | |
It's a bit that I feel is the most finished of all the movements. | 0:23:29 | 0:23:35 | |
It's a bit I've actually let people hear, you know. | 0:23:35 | 0:23:38 | |
Little Scottish... | 0:23:52 | 0:23:54 | |
Yeah, I think there is a sort of Scottish influence in there, yeah. | 0:23:54 | 0:23:57 | |
Because it's been a hobby, it's been more fun than the writing | 0:24:16 | 0:24:19 | |
because the writing is, well, how, you know, I earn my keep, basically. | 0:24:19 | 0:24:23 | |
And, you know, my career depends on the writing | 0:24:23 | 0:24:27 | |
and in a small way, you know, part of my publishers | 0:24:27 | 0:24:31 | |
and book shop owners and so on and just your public, | 0:24:31 | 0:24:35 | |
the people who actually are fans, you don't want to let them down. | 0:24:35 | 0:24:38 | |
Cos I can just do what I damn well please, | 0:24:38 | 0:24:40 | |
well, that's always been the case, you know, sort of until now. | 0:24:40 | 0:24:42 | |
This was a hobby. It was simply meant to be a giggle. | 0:24:42 | 0:24:47 | |
The only sad thing is you can't really do both at the same time. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:50 | |
I can't write because I'm staring at a screen all day | 0:24:50 | 0:24:52 | |
and the last thing I want to do is come and stare at a screen | 0:24:52 | 0:24:55 | |
for the next two or three hours of me time, as it were. | 0:24:55 | 0:24:59 | |
So I can only really do one at a time. | 0:24:59 | 0:25:01 | |
So now that the, that's it basically with the writing, | 0:25:01 | 0:25:05 | |
I can devote myself more to this, you know. | 0:25:05 | 0:25:08 | |
And even if no-one ever hears it or no-one ever enjoys it, | 0:25:08 | 0:25:11 | |
it'll be fun for me. | 0:25:11 | 0:25:13 | |
It will be genuinely therapeutic. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:15 | |
I just have such a, such a hoot with this. | 0:25:15 | 0:25:18 | |
But did writing, did it always come easily to you? | 0:25:19 | 0:25:22 | |
It appears to come easy. I mean, you write so quickly. | 0:25:22 | 0:25:27 | |
Well, yeah, I say fairly. You know it doesn't really feel it. | 0:25:27 | 0:25:30 | |
I'm only really, I'm only at the typeface for three months a year. | 0:25:30 | 0:25:35 | |
The rest of my time is my own, you know. | 0:25:35 | 0:25:38 | |
So yeah, well, I just found I like to | 0:25:38 | 0:25:40 | |
get it out the way as fast as I can. | 0:25:40 | 0:25:42 | |
I just want to, you know, go on and I get caught up in it | 0:25:42 | 0:25:45 | |
and I can't really slow down. | 0:25:45 | 0:25:47 | |
I just, I really need to, to get going. | 0:25:47 | 0:25:49 | |
Are you still writing? | 0:25:49 | 0:25:51 | |
No. No, I am going to try | 0:25:51 | 0:25:54 | |
and get the plot for the next Culture novel together | 0:25:54 | 0:25:59 | |
so that just in case there is some sort of miracle cure or whatever, | 0:25:59 | 0:26:06 | |
I don't get to the end of the year going, "Aha, beat you cancer! | 0:26:06 | 0:26:09 | |
"Oh, God, I haven't got a book to write, oh, no." | 0:26:09 | 0:26:11 | |
So I'll do it just for that but also there's a very slim | 0:26:11 | 0:26:14 | |
possibility, you know, that maybe somebody else could actually | 0:26:14 | 0:26:17 | |
write it but I don't know, not sure about that. | 0:26:17 | 0:26:20 | |
-How do you feel about that? -Mixed feelings. | 0:26:20 | 0:26:22 | |
You know, in a way it would be better for it to be written, | 0:26:22 | 0:26:25 | |
ach, it depends on the books. | 0:26:25 | 0:26:27 | |
I haven't actually got the full suite of ideas yet for a start but... | 0:26:27 | 0:26:31 | |
Are there any things you wish you'd done differently? | 0:26:31 | 0:26:34 | |
Done differently? | 0:26:34 | 0:26:36 | |
Ach, I don't know, that's one of those questions where you think - | 0:26:36 | 0:26:39 | |
well, when you have a working time machine, you know, | 0:26:39 | 0:26:43 | |
then we'll look at that seriously. | 0:26:43 | 0:26:45 | |
So there's not really much point. I don't have many regrets in my life. | 0:26:45 | 0:26:50 | |
I suppose I... | 0:26:50 | 0:26:51 | |
Oh, like a lot of men, I've hurt women and didn't need, | 0:26:53 | 0:26:57 | |
well, when I was being selfish or there's a degree of hurt towards | 0:26:57 | 0:27:01 | |
ex-girlfriends that probably didn't need to have happened but... | 0:27:01 | 0:27:06 | |
That's probably the greatest series of regrets in my life. | 0:27:06 | 0:27:11 | |
Other than that, certainly professionally, not really, no. | 0:27:11 | 0:27:15 | |
So have you made plans for your death? | 0:27:15 | 0:27:17 | |
I've had a thought about, I guess it will just be the local crematorium. | 0:27:17 | 0:27:23 | |
Adele has then promised to scatter my ashes in the Grand Canal | 0:27:23 | 0:27:27 | |
in Venice, just a small amount, you know, but in secret if necessary. | 0:27:27 | 0:27:32 | |
I don't know what the bylaws are. | 0:27:32 | 0:27:34 | |
Grand Canal in Venice, in front of a certain cafe in Paris. | 0:27:34 | 0:27:40 | |
Put some into a rocket to be fired over the Forth, | 0:27:43 | 0:27:46 | |
again, quite a small amount. | 0:27:46 | 0:27:48 | |
And oh, yeah, some onto a beach in Barra, Vatersay, whatever, | 0:27:48 | 0:27:54 | |
but not too much in any. | 0:27:54 | 0:27:57 | |
Most of them actually remain in the urn | 0:27:57 | 0:27:59 | |
and be sunk where my dad's ashes are sunk in Loch Shiel. | 0:27:59 | 0:28:04 | |
So wait a minute, some are going into a firework | 0:28:04 | 0:28:06 | |
so Iain Banks is actually going to be fired into the universe? | 0:28:06 | 0:28:10 | |
Oh, yeah. Well, into the... into the Forth, yeah. | 0:28:10 | 0:28:13 | |
Hmm. Yeah. | 0:28:13 | 0:28:15 | |
Still remaining entirely within the atmosphere, I'm afraid, but yeah. | 0:28:15 | 0:28:19 | |
-Iain Banks, thank you very much. -You're welcome. | 0:28:19 | 0:28:22 | |
HE CHUCKLES | 0:28:22 | 0:28:24 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:28:40 | 0:28:43 |