Iain Banks: Raw Spirit

This programme contains strong language

Beside one of Scotland's most dazzling creations,

lived one of the nation's most dazzling creative minds.

Just three weeks ago, I went to Iain Banks' home on the shores of the Firth of Forth.

It's where he wrote some of the most compelling fiction in a generation.

And it was where he was to face his own death from cancer.

This was to be his final interview.

It's been almost 30 years

since Iain Banks' remarkable debut, The Wasp Factory.

It marked him out as a major new talent.

Over the course of 29 books,

he created an extraordinary body of work,

with a very particular point of view.

He combined both critical acclaim and popular success.

His books are clever, controversial, funny, warm, political,

and astoundingly imaginative.

They reflect the personality of the man.

Usually with my male central characters,

they will be basically me, but in an idealised form,

ie, taller, handsomer, younger,

thinner of waist,

and more successful with the ladies.

Nowhere was the strength of that personality more evident

than in the blog he published in April.

He announced he was "officially very poorly", and had asked

his long-term girlfriend to "do him the honour of becoming his widow".

Iain Banks' final novel, The Quarry, is published next week.

One of the main characters is dying of cancer.

It's a visceral portrayal of a man furious at his approaching death.

Iain, "I am officially very poorly", that statement sounds like

the first line of an Iain Banks novel.

I suppose it does, actually.

And this idea that your novels are really like a hand grenade

and yet you were delivered of your own extraordinary hand grenade in your life.

Your first reaction to that was what?

I think it was on the lines of "Oh, bugger!" Um...

it's one of these things I guess in a sense you rehearse in your head.

I think anyone kind of does it.

You sort of game it, you play it, you think about how would I feel,

how would I react if, you know, a loved one is, well, dies

or is delivered of a verdict,

you know, prognosis like that, as it were.

And I think especially as a writer,

and I think probably within a greater field, actors are probably

the same when you have to take on

the part of someone who's dying or dead,

well, you know, if you're writing about people who are facing death

and you automatically, you kind of have to embody that.

You have to take that in quite seriously.

And obviously there are professions that are very much involved

with death, you know, funeral directors and so on

and people in A&E and, you know, ambulance drivers and so on,

you know the paramedics that come with the ambulance.

I think you'll probably find a preponderance of people like that

who are sort of pre-prepared,

or as pre-prepared as you can be with your reaction.

And I just took it as just, you know, bad luck, basically.

It did strike me almost immediately,

my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought, hah!

If I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, "Why me, God?

"What have I done to deserve this?"

Don't know why I turned into a Jewish person there, but never mind.

And I thought at least I'm free of that, at least I can simply,

you know, sort of treat it as bad luck and get on with it.

Humour has been at the heart...

Very very black humour has been at the heart of so much of your work.

I mean, does it help you get through different stages of this,

just finding the humour in things?

I guess so. It's not something you kind of do deliberately.

I guess it's just there, it's an automatic reaction, and yes,

obviously, with the loss factor, you go right back to the start.

That was, you know, it was always meant to be a black comedy,

that was very much the idea, and I...

I occasionally get asked, if I could be a character in one of my novels,

you know, who would it be?

There's quite a limited choice, given the rather unpleasant ends

that some of them come to.

But were you...? The shock waves that came from the announcement have been phenomenal.

Did they surprise you?

"Astound" would be closer to it.

Yeah, I mean, we deliberately released information

on a day that we were about to head off to Venice with our pals

and we wouldn't be coming back for ten days

and I was pretty certain I'd be old news by then.

I think, let's be fair here, though, it was a slow news day.

Oh, I think you're underestimating your impact.

I thought... We were just coming back through the Alps,

heading from Venice to Paris, we got news of Thatcher dying.

If Thatcher had died the same day that I'd put out my announcement,

I wouldn't have been anywhere near the front page.

I'd be lucky to get a diary entry on page 27 or whatever,

and the equivalent on the BBC News and so on.

So yeah, being on the front page of, you know, several newspapers

was... That was kind of gobsmacking.

The impact on people's lives, were you surprised at that?

Oh, yeah, that came mostly through the website.

A pal, Martin Bell, had this great idea for having this website

so people could express what they wanted to express

and I did say I'd read all of the posts, which I'm doing.

I just read page 86, so only a hundred and a bit to go.

And it was astonishing.

I'm still... I'm only on day two now,

about two days after the announcement, so...

Because obviously you're in this situation, you're constantly trying

to find the positives, you know, few and far between though they are.

But one positive that did strike me,

I'm getting all this love and admiration now

rather than people standing around talking about me awfully well

when I'm dead at the wake, or that sort of thing,

so it's been great to appreciate that now while I'm still alive.

You wrote The Quarry thinking it would be coming out this October or so forth

and they're rushing it out, so tell me a bit about the writing of The Quarry.

Well, it's, um... The narrator is an 18-year-old boy

who's on one or two different spectra, as it were,

possibly Asperger's being one of them.

But in a sense the main character's his dad who's dying of cancer.

Ha-ha! Ho-ho!

But I was 87,000 words into the book before I discovered the bad news.

I had no inkling, so it wasn't as though this is a response

to the condition, to the disease or anything,

and the book had been kind of ready to go.

And then 10,000 words from the end, as it turned out,

I suddenly discovered that I had cancer.

I've really got to stop doing my research too late.

This is such a bad idea.

But the big thing, one of the big things about The Quarry,

I mean, there's lots to talk about it, but one of the big things

is that Guy, who has cancer and has aggressive cancer,

is absolutely raging against the dying of the light.

-Oh, yes, uh-huh.

-I mean, he is furious.

Well, I think, yeah, and in a sense justifiably so.

First of all, he feels he hasn't done much with his life.

Doesn't apply to me.

You know, I've had a brilliant life basically and I think I've been

more, even including the news of the cancer, I think I've still been

more lucky than unlucky, but also, you know, I've written 29 books.

I'm leaving a substantial body of work behind me.

How long it'll survive, who knows, but I can be quite sort of

you know, proud of that, and I am, you know.

But also he's got this thing, he hates the idea

of the world going on without him,

which is kind of stupid but that's just

part of his character, whereas it doesn't concern me in the least.

That seems a bizarre thing to resent, you know,

"I take the fucking point that if you have a choice of being

"negative or positive about something like this,

"you might as well be positive.

"You can't do any harm even if it borders on self-delusion

"and happy-clappy fuckwittery, but there's a funny fucking thing

"about having terminal cancer.

"I mean, apart from the hilarity of all the pain and the weakness

"and the fear and the general humiliation of the disease

"and the fucking treatments..."

He breaks off to cough.

"It makes it hard to be fucking positive about any fucking thing,

"with the notable exception of feeling positive

"that you're going to fucking die."

You're 87,000 words into The Quarry then, and what changed

after your diagnosis in the writing and the revision?

Well, the first thing I did, I'd taken my laptop

when I first got the original bad news, as it were, in Kirkcaldy

in the Victoria Hospital and I'd taken my laptop in

just to...just thought I might do a bit of work while I was there.

And I couldn't really be bothered.

I'd basically done my work, my words for the day anyway,

so, having got this news, I sat in bed and I wrote -

there's a bit where Guy says, "I shall not be upset

"to leave this stupid bloody country and this idiotic, bloody human race

"and this idiotic world" and the rest of it, it's a proper rant.

I think it kind of changed places.

Originally it was exactly where I got the news, it was exactly 87,000.

It was changed slightly because my editor said, yes, it'd actually

be more powerful in the sort of address on camera that he does,

the recording, so we changed that.

-That definitely worked better.

-So he's recording into a tape?

Yeah. And that was it, that was my one, so I thought, well...

I remember sitting there, thinking, you're a writer, you know,

you've got to use some of these feelings you're having right now.

You know, use it to go to town on the whole idea,

so some of my most darkest thoughts at that point were channelled

into that bit of writing, you know.

Other than that, that was kind of it.

That was it out of my system, just the book rolled on because I knew

what was going to be happening.

You know, it was fairly well planned out,

so that was the only extra bit, it was just me being all bitter.

Getting your bitterness out in the character of Guy.

Ideal medium, yeah.

"And I shall not miss being part of a species lamentably ready

"to resort to torture, rape and mass murder

"just because some other poor fucker or fuckers

"is or are slightly different from

"those intent upon doing such harm,

"be it because they happen to worship

"a very slightly different set of superstitious idiocies,

"possess skin occupying a non-identical position

"on a pan-tone racial colour wheel,

"or had the fucking temerity to pop out of a womb

"on the other side of a river, ocean, mountain range,

"other major geographical feature, or, indeed, just a straight line

"drawn across the desert by some bored and ignorant bureaucrat

"umpteen thousand miles away and a century ago.

"None of these things shall I miss.

"Frankly, it's a relief to be getting shot of the necessity

"of watching such bollocks play out.

"I would still rather have the choice, mark you,

"but, as this would appear to be being denied me,

"I am making the best of a bad job and looking on the bright side -

"I shall be free, at last, of that nagging, persistent sensation

"that I am, for the most part, surrounded by fucking idiots."

It just seems uncanny that you should be writing

a book about terminal cancer as you were given a diagnosis.

Not only that, only Iain Banks could get the diagnosis,

sit with his laptop and write about it there and then.

Oh, no, I disagree.

I think perhaps the majority of writers would do that.

In the hospital with your laptop?

It was there, you know, I was sort of - bugger!

So you do have to, you know, I think it's a natural thing

for a writer just to express themselves.

You might not do it with the idea of immediate inclusion into the novel

if that's what you're working on or whatever

but because... I think it was just coincidence, you know.

I think it was just the way things worked

that I happened to have chosen that subject.

But in the actual... in The Quarry itself,

you're very unflinching about the impact of cancer,

you know, even day-to-day impact of cancer.

In fact, in a very Iain Banks way,

you kind of relish some of that detail.

Damn, it shows!

Well, yeah, I think...

You can't really pussyfoot around a subject like that

and especially not when you've got someone like Guy

who is just the character that he is.

He's never going to sort of shy away from stuff, you know.

But people say that you... That dark side, that kind of...

thrawn and...

thrawn is the way I see it -

your characters are often very thrawn.

To me, in a way, that is very much about...it is about Scotland.

Oh, yeah, definitely, yeah.

I mean, I've always, well, a lot...

I didn't realise how Scottish I was in a sense for a long time.

I remember shocking my parents when they were still here in the Ferry,

the first time, so it would be before the age of nine,

telling my mum and dad I felt more British than Scottish.

"What?! You're no son of mine, get out!"

I think that kind of changed,

you kind of come to realise how much of your culture

is specifically Scottish

and I think it profoundly started to change

when Thatcher came to power and realised that the era of one nation,

you know, conservatism was gone, that was it.

In a sense even more when Labour stopped being Labour

and became New Labour and became big fans of privatisation, etc.

I think Scottish people are just kind of automatically, you know,

more communitarian, more socialist, if you like.

I think that kind of has to be,

it's only fair that that's reflected in the governments that we have

-and we're part of the way down that road, but...

-But it's...

It seems to be your feeling about it seems more visceral now.

You write in The Guardian about the whole UKIP experience as well.

Do you think your own views have, not hardened,

but become much more solid in the last year about Scotland?

I think, well, I think it's been a process that has gone...

taken longer than that. I think it's, you know, a good...

But in a sense it's going back maybe 20-odd years or whatever.

I mean, when I stopped voting Labour,

I was casting around for who to vote for

so I was just kind of voting for whoever had the biggest...

Any sort of relatively serious party that had any sort of chance

of being in power that had the most left-wing policies.

That's why I started voting for the SNP.

It was a purely pragmatic political,

not nationalist thing at all

and it's been just a gradual, you know,

progression in a sense from that to becoming more nationalist about it.

It's the only way to make sense of the difference.

Do you think there is a role of a writer in cultural change

to kind of help the readers through, through stories

but not necessarily through, not kind of evangelising?

Um, yeah, you've got to be very careful about that.

It's very easy to, you know, a writer, to overstate

the, um...you know, the influence that writers have.

I think we're all a bit egotistical that way, as it were,

"Yes, what I think's incredibly important, you should listen."

That doesn't stop you having the odd rant. Look at Dead Air.

I know - that is a book full of rants.

That was the whole idea, to have a sort of a left-wing shock jock. Ha-ha!

I leaned closer to the mike, lowering my voice.

Phil closed his eyes. "Thought for today, listener.

"For our American cousins."

Phil groaned.

"If you do find and kill Bin Laden,

"assuming he is the piece of scum behind this,

"or even if you just find his body..."

I paused, watching the hands on the studio clock

flick silently towards the top of the hour.

Phil had taken his glasses off.

"Wrap him in pigskin and bury him under Fort Knox.

"I can even tell you how deep - 1,350 feet.

"That's 110 storeys."

Another pause.

"Don't worry about that noise, listeners,

"it's just the sound of my producer's head gently thumping on the desk.

"Oh, one last thing - as it stands,

"what happened last week wasn't an attack on democracy.

"If it was, they'd have crashed a plane into Al Gore's house.

"That's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow, if I'm still here.

"News next, after these vital pieces of consumerist propaganda."

That was great fun, loved writing that book.

But yeah, I think you have to be careful.

I think you're more likely to be reflecting more than leading, put it that way.

You might see yourself as a figurehead

but the figurehead doesn't produce the emotive energy.

It's the sales that do.

But the character of a nation is often underpinned

by the culture of it, including the writing,

and if I think about writers...

..like, um...

House Of The Green Shutters and Lanark,

you're...to me you're the kind of inheritor of that.

I mean, in a way, there's...

there's a wonderful kind of humanity in the bleakness sometimes.

I don't think I'm the inheritor, I mean, I'm deeply...

..humbled to be put in the same category as Alasdair Gray,

but he's still around, in fact he's going to outlive me as well, you know.

So I can't believe I've inherited in that sense.

But in Lanark, the inheritor of Lanark rather than...

I...I wouldn't, I don't think I can accept that...

I think it's the single greatest Scottish novel of the 20th century

and no, that would be, that would be egotism a step too far

even for my egotistical, you know, sort of outlook.

But what did Lanark mean to you?

I think it kind of taught me, although I was still, you know...

I suppose I was still learning as a writer,

I certainly was, in fact, but it kind of reminded me

of the freedom you could give yourself

and the ability to mix genres to include fantasy and science fiction

in a sense and a means to...

a Bildungsroman, and almost a historical novel.

It was... And it's also the forthrightness

of Alasdair's voice in there.

It's so clear and it struck me over the years that the writers

that I most admire, their writing is about clarity.

Alasdair Gray achieves that.

Mike Harrison, M John Harrison,

whose ear I bent about a week ago

telling him. We met up down in London

and rather than send him a letter

I just told him, you know, that I thought he was a bloody genius.

But you've written to Alasdair Gray as well?

I wrote to Alasdair Gray, yes, a fan-boy letter, basically,

and said, "I know this is gushing and I know how hard it is to reply

"to gushing stuff, so don't feel you have to reply."

I didn't even put my own address on, to encourage him not to.

Nevertheless he did reply and it was just a lovely lovely letter.

It was really nice and beautifully put together.

You can see the guy's an artist

even when he's just writing a letter and it's gorgeous.

Let's just go back to The Wasp Factory for a minute

and from the very get-go, you talk about it as a black comedy,

but it's a deeply moving book as well about a twisted childhood.

Oh, yeah, it's meant basically to press as many buttons

as is possible and kind of cheerfully going for

the Grand Guignol, you know, sort of feel as well.

It was an extraordinary...I mean, it was your first published novel.

-Absolutely, yeah.

-And it absolutely, that was a hand grenade.

It was, yeah, it was the right book at the right time

and by God it got me noticed, you know.

And I'd been anticipating a slow build-up.

I thought if I was lucky I'd get another couple of novels published

and maybe hopefully if they sold more and more, then I might be able

to give up the day job, and instead The Wasp Factory was just out there,

just a huge sensation and all the adverse publicity was

if anything more productive than the praise that it got.

I don't know, maybe if it had come out a year before or a year after,

it wouldn't have had the same effect. I don't know, but it certainly worked

and I'm still very proud of it.

There's none of the books that I'm not proud of.

There's ones I think I could have done better with.

I still think Canal Dreams is the runt of the litter

but, yeah, I'm still very very proud of The Wasp Factory

and it was... You were saying earlier about the quality,

I realised as I was sitting there those couple of days

coming up with the ideas that this is looking a bit like Wasp Factory.

I thought, well, that's OK.

You're allowed to have themes, you're not just always just repeating yourself

if you have similarities between your novels.

And I kind of just liked the idea of playing around with that

and about the father/son relationship and...

But I mean, there's a bit,

you can almost see the workings in The Quarry.

-Yeah, you know what I mean.

-Yeah.

When Kit talks about this thing about he's got, about trying

to measure people accurately, and one of the methods he resorts to

is wandering into the room at night when they're asleep and trying

to measure them and how frustrating it is and almost nobody's stretched,

lies stretched out like that, and everybody sort of curls up.

But he goes through some pain to say, "But it's not like

"I'm a mad axe murderer or anything," and that was almost there

just because of the Wasp Factory, so you're reassured that Kit...

-Kit's not going to be bumping people off.

-Not murderous.

No, Kit's not, Kit's a wonderful, gentle human being, but then,

just going into some of the kind of set pieces in The Wasp Factory,

I mean, the death of Esmeralda.

I mean...extraordinary because you loved kites as well, didn't you?

Oh, yeah, I used to make my own kites and it was...

Used to...got big black bin liners and tape them to canes

and take them up to the hills above Greenock and fly them.

So I just remember, a good old windy day in Inverclyde

and going, "Bloody hell!"

Almost getting pulled off my feet, and I thought, if you were lighter,

if you were a child, you would be pulled off your feet and thought, hmm, really?

And because I, you know, from way back there, I still wanted,

that was always my ambition, to be a writer, you just think,

well, that's a way to kill somebody off if they're quite small.

Esmeralda looked round one last time at me,

giggling, and I laughed back.

Then I let the lines go.

The winch hit her in the small of the back and she yelped.

Then she was dragged off her feet as the lines pulled her

and the loops tightened around her wrists.

I staggered back, partly to make it look good

on the off-chance there was somebody watching

and partly because letting go of the winch had put me off balance.

I fell to the ground as Esmerelda left it forever.

The kite just kept snapping and flapping and flapping and snapping

and it hauled the girl off the earth and into the air, winch and all.

I lay on my back and watched it for a second,

then got up and ran after her as fast as I could,

again just because I knew I couldn't catch her.

She was screaming and waggling her legs for all she was worth,

but the cruel loops of nylon had her about the wrists,

the kite was in the jaws of the wind,

and she was already well out of reach

even if I had wanted to catch her.

I ran and ran, jumping off a dune and rolling down its seaward face,

watching the tiny struggling figure being hoisted

farther and farther into the sky as the kite swept her away.

'Childhood, often fraught and damaged,

'plays a central role in Iain Banks' stories.'

By contrast, his own was very happy,

and mostly spent here in North Queensferry,

and it's where he returned to live almost 20 years ago.

This was a great place to grow up.

Even if I'd only had indifferent parents,

your average parents, it was such an adventure playground.

There was even more of the military stuff left around, you know,

First World War emplacements

and Second World War anti-aircraft gun emplacements.

It was just a great place to wander round.

It's almost an island, it's got that lovely self-contained feel about it.

Just three-quarters of an island, you know, this wee peninsula,

but for the scale of a child it was absolutely perfect.

-It seemed huge.

-But even just being in the midst

of these two great engineering feats.

-Fantastic.

-It was, yeah.

I got to see the road bridge being built, and that was...

that was fun, watching the whole thing come together

and we saw it almost to the end,

but it was always this one, it was always the Forth Bridge,

the rail bridge itself, that was always...

How wonderful it is. And there was something inevitable

-that you'd have to use the bridge in your fiction?

-I think so, yeah.

It was, it's one of the...

Almost, yeah, the only book I did that came to me in a dream.

I just had this dream.

I was living in Faversham in Kent at the time,

and I had this dream about a gigantic version of the bridge,

of this bridge,

just on a different scale and the size of a city, in a sense,

and I just woke up thinking, right, oh that's cool, that's nice.

Be nice if all the books came that way, totally effortless.

If he'd had less than the legal limit to drink

he would take the Quattro out

and drive to North Queensferry to sit beneath the great dark bridge,

listening to the water lap against the stones and the trains rumble overhead.

He would smoke a joint or just breathe the fresh air.

If he felt pity for himself, it was only one timid, tentative

part of his mind that felt so.

There was another part of him which seemed like a hawk or an eagle,

hungry and cruel and fanatically keen-eyed.

Self-pity lasted a matter of seconds in the open.

Then the bird of prey fell on it, tearing it, ripping it.

The bird was the real world,

a mercenary dispatched by his embarrassed conscience,

the angry voice of all the people in the world, that vast majority

who were worse off than he was - just common sense.

He discovered, to his knowing, almost righteous dismay, that the bridge

was not painted end-to-end over a neat three-year period.

It was done piecemeal,

and the cycle lasted anything between four and six years.

Another myth bites the dust, he thought - par for the course.

I think it had been such a large part of my life for so long,

it was this gigantic symbol that had affected me in all sorts of ways.

I think it's also there in the science fiction.

I've just always liked big structures, you know!

When you root some of your work in Scotland,

that's one part of your imagination.

The other part of your imagination's creating completely different worlds, for example the Culture,

this kind of slightly very sarcastic kind of supergroup, as it were,

-that kind of fly round the universe sorting things out.

-Uh-huh.

You like the idea of creating different worlds?

I love it, yeah.

There's an enormous freedom that you get in science fiction

that you can just, you can go anywhere and do anything.

It's that simple.

The things that I love and things that I tend to read most

are science fiction and, you know, mainstream literature.

And those are what I love to write as well.

And it's been a privilege in a way to be able to get away with it,

you know, for an entire career, be able to do both.

You do kind of feel sometimes you're doing the thing you're told,

military people say you should never do,

which is fight wars on two fronts

but, you know, I think as long as you write fast enough and I write...

Very fast.

A book a year, which is not madly fast, you know.

Terry Pratchett used to way outstrip me in terms of production.

I think that, yeah, as long as you don't...

It means that people are only ever a book away,

two years away, as it were, from you know, their genre of choice

if they don't read both so,

yeah, that's been, you know, just fun, basically.

But is the idea behind The Culture

to imagine a world that you think, in a way, would be better?

Yes, oh, it's didactic.

It's my idea of what is as close as possible,

as close as possible to anything remotely like us,

as a species, could get to in terms of being, if not an actual utopia

then a sort of functioning, as good as we're going to get utopia.

Having said that, I think that,

I don't think humanity is up to it, quite frankly.

I think we're too nasty.

We may find that there are genes that code for xenophobia.

Well, there are genes that code for, you know, racism

and sexism, for, you know, anti-Semitism,

for Islamophobia, all the xenophobic things, all the things

where we decide that we're this, we're one good privileged group and

those bastards over there, well, we hate them.

And all the excuses that we found,

we find you know to be so deeply, deeply unpleasant each other.

But do you find yourself despairing about humanity at the moment?

Ach, a wee bit, yes, frankly, yeah.

Yeah, I think just in terms of the world situation,

it's not looking good.

We haven't really dealt with the last economic disaster properly.

We're just really heading up for another one, you know.

Already this government, you know, the British government

is stoking up the next housing bubble, which is just ludicrous.

It's insanity.

And, you know, Obama has been a bit of a disappointment.

On Earth, one of the things that a large proportion of the locals

is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which,

with a sureness and certainty

so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears

some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either

thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter,

space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily

away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least.

Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often

harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take

years and generations to manifest themselves.

You make a statement in The State Of The Art,

how could they have created a society where

those who have get more and those who don't have get even less.

I mean, it's like a credo that you believe very strongly,

that we've got it wrong.

Oh, absolutely, yeah.

I think...the thing is, it's not impossible to correct things.

I love the way people talk about, you know, blue sky thinking

and yet you try to suggest anything properly radical,

they just think you're completely insane.

You can imagine for example a different form of capitalism.

If you're not going to have a proper thorough-going revolution,

I think a capitalism that didn't allow joint stock companies,

where there's no such thing as a public limited company,

where all...well what you'd have instead would be partnerships

in the proper old-fashioned sense that there was unlimited liability

and you wouldn't have this farcical belief that you can somehow

turn a company into a person and the debts of the company are purely

attached to it and not to the people that started it

who would have benefited had it gone well.

It might lead to a less dynamic form of capitalism

but arguably, you know, the dynamic form of capitalism we've had

has kind of messed us up rather a lot.

But you are fascinated about civilisations in the future

and, I mean, you must believe then presumably that out there

somewhere in a galaxy far, far away there is life?

Oh, probably, yes.

I mean, there's so many stars in the galaxy and there's so many galaxies.

And, you know, what we know of, what we can see of the universe,

it would just seem highly unlikely that there's just us.

I mean, we might not be that far away.

One of the things I regret a great deal is that I'll not

live long enough to see some of the results coming in from

some really good telescopes we're putting in space, in particular.

They'll actually be able to analyse the composition of exo planets,

their atmosphere and you'll be able to tell whether

they've got life on them.

You'll be able to, all you do is you get, you know,

you know exactly what the spectrum is of this star and as the star

slips behind the planet, the way the spectrum alters,

in other words, what's been taken out of it, will tell you how much

carbon, how much oxygen, carbon dioxide and so on, how much oxygen

and nitrogen, whatever, is in the, in that atmosphere of that planet.

And that's an astounding thing to think that we're going to know this

in, you know, 10, 20 years, you know.

-Yeah, damned annoying.

-HE LAUGHS

Are you a kind of evangelising atheist in your work?

I've been describing myself as an evangelical atheist

for about 20 years, yes.

It's not enough to be sitting in the corner going,

well, I know I'm right, I'm not going to tell anybody else.

No, no, you have to, you have to go up to people's doors almost.

Have you discovered the power of atheism, brother?

Much more effective.

But what about, you don't...

There's a tiny bit of agnosticism in there on the basis that

if you think there are other lives on other planets,

I seem to remember you said something,

damn there might just be a God out there playing a trick on us.

Oh could be, there has to be a sort of

half a percent of, you know, of agnosticism in there

just because you just never know.

In a sense, because it seems so blatantly bloody obvious

that there is no God and it's all just another nonsense

so it's just, it's us expressing ourselves.

And as I'm saying in that piece about basing our fears and hopes and

so on, that well, you know it could just be some gigantic cosmic joke.

But like Christopher Hitchens, are you anti-theist?

Do you think that religion is actually actively evil?

Not necessarily, and certainly not all the time.

It is a comfort to people, apart from anything else, you know.

But you'd say a false comfort?

Yeah, but again, I keep coming back to the fact I could be wrong.

And it's hard to know what else you'd put in place.

In the end, I would love to see religion just wither away

and, you know, just kind of be so exposed to reason

and to rationality that it would simply cease to be.

Or it would be very much a minority sport, as it were.

But as actually evil, well, it can be, yes.

I mean, it can certainly be.

Evil's such a...kind of an all or nothing word, isn't it?

-Mm-hmm.

-Yes, it can be, you know but I mean it turned out

so could communism as well, for that matter, you know.

There's terrible crimes against humanity committed in its name.

It was supposed to be all about people, not about religion at all.

But you actively rail against, you know,

the practice of different countries.

You talk about Judaism

because actually you're very anti Israel's politics, aren't you?

Oh, yes but that has to be kept separate from...

Yeah, quite different but you do actively campaign,

you will not have your books sold in Israel, will you?

For what it's worth, yeah, my little cultural boycott.

I did the same thing once I realised that I could do it against

South Africa but, you know, even less point there

in a sense that it was a sporting boycott that kind of convinced

a lot of South Africans.

But do you think it's important to make a stand, however small it is?

Cutting up your passport and sending it to Downing Street,

were you just annoyed that afternoon to the extent that it

was the only thing you thought you could do to make your protest clear?

Oh, no, I did think about it. It was a fairly big step, you know.

But I just felt ashamed to be British.

I didn't want to, I'd kind of come to despise

the symbol of British-ness, you know this thing where the queen

graciously granted you the ability to travel abroad.

Thank you very bloody much.

And also you automatically become, you know, sort of at a minor

level an ambassador for your country as soon as you travel,

as soon as you travel abroad

and I just didn't want to, to be doing that.

But you were very actively anti, for example,

the invasion of Iraq and so forth,

I mean, that was really in the nature of your protest, wasn't it?

Absolutely, yeah.

I just thought it was unbelievably stupid.

Well, it was immoral, unnecessary and it was illegal,

simple as that.

And the motives of the people who were promoting it

were just, they were simply lying.

You know, Bush was lying, Blair was lying, they were all just lying.

Well, ya-bloody-hoo.

One good thing, one decent image to come out of the war -

the sight of Saddam's statue being toppled.

But even this is poorly done, messy and staged and

unauthentic and incomplete.

The pictures show the awful bloody thing starting to tilt.

Then they cut and when we see it next they have beefier

chains on it and it's a US vehicle doing the pulling, not the locals.

The statue falls, but does not detach from its plinth,

two big metal reinforcing poles inside,

anchoring it to the concrete.

A US flag is put on top before somebody realises

this might give out the wrong - for which read accurate - message,

and an Iraqi flag is found instead.

Oh, and still no WMDs, used, deployed,

anywhere near being deployed,

or even found stored in some dusty desert bunker.

Do you believe if Scotland was independent

it should take its place, not as a world's policeman,

but actually being actively involved through NATO or whatever?

I don't know about through NATO.

I certainly think you could be a responsible part of

the UN peacekeeping force.

We have got quite a marshal sort of reputation and so on.

But it would be, you know, quite a major part of,

in fact, a major reason for voting for independence would be to

never be involved, hopefully, in any of these, you know,

disgraceful foreign adventures ever again.

What do you do about Syria?

I, I don't bloody know, I really don't.

I think it is so...

Do you believe we have a role at all in Syria?

I think the role that we properly have is never to support

these people in the first place.

We should never have supported, you know, Saddam Hussein.

We should never have been in even relatively close terms that

we became with Colonel Gaddafi, latterly.

We should just oppose tyrants from the start and

I kind of despise this sort of realpolitik idea that

my enemy's enemy is, you know my, friend.

Nonsense. You know, it has no moral concept in there whatsoever.

There's no moral part to it.

Your enemy's enemy might be a bigger bastard than your enemy, you know.

And it just, it's as ludicrous as...yeah, I guess that's evil.

It's as evil as saying my country, right or wrong, you know.

In that case, nothing that your country can do can ever be wrong then.

That's just despicable.

So there's no genocide,

there's no amount of mass murder or torture that can be carried

out that you won't disagree with.

That's just utterly, utterly bizarre and genuinely evil sort of attitude.

But do you believe in moral progress

or are we in an arrested phase at the moment?

I think the clutch is slipping at the moment, put it that way.

I believe in moral progress, yes, of course.

I mean, Steven Pinker wrote, I can't remember the name of the book now

but I think we are gradually doing better.

Fewer people are dying despite all the mayhem

and the horribleness of which we see so much nowadays.

Because of the media bringing it right to you.

You know, we are killing fewer of ourselves

so, yeah, there's moral progress. We've still got a way to go.

You know, I'm not sure we're getting much more

than a C on the report card but absolutely,

yes, of course there's moral progress.

But have you been extravagant?

I mean, you have in the past slightly returned to

being a petrol head but you were a petrol head in the past, weren't you?

Oh, hell, yeah.

-Yeah, well...

-HE SIGHS

Yes, it's this idea that because I'm going to be

saving on all this carbon usage over the next, you know,

20 or 30 years by the simple medium of dying, I thought

yeah, I could indulge myself so yes, we have an M-5 now.

This is a BMW M-5?

BMW M-5 V-10 engine, 500 of your earth brake horsepower.

By the side of Loch Fyne, I head north again

and back down Glendaruel, finally having to press on once more

as I've ever so slightly underestimated the time required -

again - and so end up gunning the Defender up the long

curving slopes towards the viewpoint looking out over the Kyles of Bute.

This is one of the best views in Argyll,

maybe one of the great views of Scotland -

a vast, opening delta of ragged, joining lochs,

flung arcs of islets

and low-hilled island disappearing into the distance.

And do you plan to drive it very fast?

Oh, yes! No, not irresponsibly fast for that would be wrong.

But, yeah...

Doesn't really matter if you get a speeding ticket now though, does it?

That's true, actually.

But that need to get that kind of adrenaline buzz,

you used to get that through drugs as well.

A bit, yeah. I've got old though, I've kind of gone off my drugs

which is quite a shame, you know. And I had to stop taking cocaine.

Well two reasons, one was simply that it was bad for my heart.

I used to get, I occasionally get arrhythmia anyway

but it did that, you know, it kind of guaranteed that.

But also, I just got so disgusted by the morals of the trade.

-And the amount of cruelty...

-I was going to ask you about that.

..And murders that take place.

You just couldn't, I just found it morally insupportable

to even think about doing cocaine again.

But in terms of the fast cars, that was,

that was very much the excess of the era.

You could never mix the two, of course.

Yes, you could never mix presumably the cocaine and the fast cars.

But on the fast cars bit, I mean, you could do that.

I mean, here you were on the left but you were running round in Porsches.

Oh, yeah. I have never understood this thing about

champagne socialist.

So? You know are Tories not allowed to swig beer?

I think you'll find they are, you know.

So I don't see anything wrong with that whatsoever.

As I say, overpaid, got to get rid of it.

You know, I can't...

You know, we're quite good with causes and

charities that sort of thing but, yeah, the money's there to be spent.

And we've got some savings and so on.

But do what you enjoy and I just bloody love fast cars, you know.

But accompanying the fast cars is the music, and music's

been a real importance to you in your, in your life.

I mean, lots of people would say that but for you particularly

because you can listen to music when you write and so forth.

And has that been something that's given you solace just now?

I think the solace is going to come because I write music, you know.

I've pretensions towards being a composer.

And that's what I intend to spend most of my creative

energies on in the next couple of months or however long I've got,

is writing music and trying to get it to some

level of presentability so that should be accessible.

Until now, this had been a private pastime for Iain,

but he was ready to share it.

OK, take me through what we have here.

-Well, this is a list of songs, these are...

-All composed by you?

Oh, yeah, that's the whole idea.

So the first about 60 songs go way back,

go back to when I was at university and just, you know, plonking away

on a guitar and inventing my own form of musical notation as well.

You're not, you don't read that much music?

I can, I can read it very, very slowly now, you know.

But there's no real point, the thing about the software that I'm using

here is you just don't need to.

There's simply no need, no requirement whatsoever.

So a very, very simple little song.

You can see it's quite, it's only got a few tracks going

but it's got the different instruments shown there.

ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYS

Simple as simple can be.

And on it goes, much like that.

I have a slight fetish for using as few instruments as possible,

keeping the whole thing looking nice on the screen,

which is probably completely irrelevant.

But you might take something like this...

Looking nice on the screen presumably has no relation to how it sounds?

It's nothing whatsoever to do with it, you know.

I try to get away without using chords

because everyone else uses chords and starts from chords.

So this is your own kind of modernism, is it?

You could call it that if you wanted to dignify the process, yes.

It's part of trying to stay away from the things that

everybody else does.

So I'm trying to produce something that is going to sound a bit...

-Banksian?

-Banksian if you like, yeah.

So this is the symphony wot I wrote and I'm,

well, I'm still slightly in the course of writing

because it needs further tinkering with because it's such a long piece.

There's always more you can do, it's a bit like a novel.

A short story can be completely finished,

-a novel in a sense can always be tinkered with.

-Look at that!

It looks so different from everything else.

-God, it looks so complex.

-Well that's because it is.

HE LAUGHS

MUSIC PLAYS

This is the start of the second movement.

It's a bit that I feel is the most finished of all the movements.

It's a bit I've actually let people hear, you know.

Little Scottish...

Yeah, I think there is a sort of Scottish influence in there, yeah.

Because it's been a hobby, it's been more fun than the writing

because the writing is, well, how, you know, I earn my keep, basically.

And, you know, my career depends on the writing

and in a small way, you know, part of my publishers

and book shop owners and so on and just your public,

the people who actually are fans, you don't want to let them down.

I only just do what I damn well please,

well, that's always been the case, you know sort of until now.

This was a hobby. It was simply meant to be a giggle.

The only sad thing is you can't really do both at the same time.

I can't write because I'm staring at a screen all day

and the last thing I want to do is come and stare at a screen

for the next two or three hours of me time, as it were.

So I can only really do one at a time.

So now that the, that's it basically with the writing,

I can devote myself more to this, you know.

And even if no-one ever hears it or no-one ever enjoys it,

it'll be fun for me.

It will be genuinely therapeutic.

I just have such a, such a hoot with this.

But did writing, did it always come easily to you?

It appears to come easy. I mean, you write so quickly.

Well, yeah, I say fairly. You know it doesn't really feel it.

I'm only really, I'm only at the typeface for three months a year.

The rest of my time is my own, you know.

So yeah, well, I just found I like to

get it out the way as fast as I can.

I just want to, you know, go on and I get caught up in it

and I can't really slow down.

I just, I really need to, to get going.

But when you're working, when you're writing, is it all-consuming?

I mean, you just think about your characters all the time?

Pretty much yeah.

At the same time, I do try to write office hours

so I've got time to socialise in the evening if necessary,

and have weekends away with our pals.

So it's not that totally all-consuming.

I remember in the old days

when I was working with...just, you know, sheets of paper and a

manual typewriter, I'd think, right, OK, today I'm going to

write 15 pages and I'd get to the end of that 15th page and stop.

You know, I didn't sort of go onto the...no matter if it

was in the middle of a sentence or some highly emotionally charged bit.

Sort of that's it, I know where I'm going and I'm start off tomorrow.

It's never been a problem. You fit instantly back into where you were.

And what about your workings? Do you have lots of workings?

-Yes, but I don't show them.

-Ever?

Well, no. I mean, I don't.

Yeah, there's sort of notes and there's all sorts of, you know,

all in electronic form in these days, I guess.

I do print them out but, yeah,

there's usually, you know, quite a lot.

Well, I don't know, maybe 20, 30 pages maybe.

Culture novel, 40 pages because it's more complicated.

And that's just the initial...

Ideally, what you want is just one page.

It should always be about one page where you describe the

whole plot of the book in whatever degree of brevity.

And that way, you always know where you're going,

you can see it in just the one sort of glance.

But it changes, does it not? Or does yours not change?

They're not supposed to change too much, the little blighters, no.

The idea is, if you've done your planning properly,

you just go with that. You're kind of ready to head off.

Obviously the little extra things come to you as you write it

and dialogue is always invented right there.

It's sort of just-in-time production, as it were.

But everything else should really have been thought out beforehand

so you never sort of find yourself writing yourself into a corner or

realising you killed that character off four chapters ago

so why are you writing about him now, you know?

And you want The Quarry out fast because you want to sell lots of books?

I wanted to hold a copy.

I might not be around in October, you know, so for them to bring it

back to June, forward to June rather is just superb.

Oh, yeah uh-huh. Yeah, it makes sense.

And the fact that it's, you know,

although it does start to look like a cunning plan of mine, doesn't it?

I'll pretend I've got cancer and I'm actually fine and dandy,

I'm hale and hearty and nothing wrong with me.

And that way I'll sell more books out of sympathy.

If only that were true!

Are you still writing?

No. No, I am going to try

and get the plot for the next Culture novel together

so that just in case there is some sort of miracle cure or whatever,

I don't get to the end of the year going, "Aha, beat you cancer!

"Oh, God, I haven't got a book to write, oh, no."

So I'll do it just for that but also there's a very slim

possibility, you know, that maybe somebody else could actually

write it but I don't know, not sure about that.

-How do you feel about that?

-Mixed feelings.

You know, in a way it would be better for it to be written,

ach, it depends on the books.

I haven't actually got the full suite of ideas yet for a start but...

Are there any things you wish you'd done differently?

Done differently?

Ach, I don't know, that's one of those questions where you think -

well, when you have a working time machine, you know,

then we'll look at that seriously.

So there's not really much point. I don't have many regrets in my life.

I suppose I...

Oh, like a lot of men, I've hurt women and didn't need,

well, when I was being selfish or there's a degree of hurt towards

ex girlfriends that probably didn't need to have happened but...

That's probably the greatest series of regrets in my life.

But other than that and certainly professionally, not really, no.

Do you think that you are a selfish person?

Oh, I know I'm a selfish person, yeah.

That's why I try so hard to be nice.

You know, it's compensation in a way, you know.

I think of it as, being raised as an only child and one who,

who's, who was kind of made to feel special as well in a sense,

and just being an only child but also being, you know,

living in your head as much as you do when you're a writer,

and I think that kind of makes you selfish in a way, you know.

Having said that, I don't want to make excuses for myself.

I am just a naturally selfish person anyway but I do try to

compensate for it by being nice to everybody else.

What will happen to the Iain Banks' archive?

I don't know, I think, I think...

I got a letter the other day from the Scottish National Library

but I can't remember if it was, I haven't properly dealt with it.

I haven't replied to it, certainly.

I can't remember if that was about everything or whatever.

Archive sounds so grand, doesn't it, you know?

I suppose if it was going to go an educational establishment,

it would be Stirling because that's...

-Stirling University where you went?

-Where I went.

I haven't really given it the amount of thought it obviously

deserves and it needs but I will have it, I'll have a think, yeah.

And might there be an Iain Banks or an Iain M Banks foundation?

-HE LAUGHS

-No. Don't think so, no.

So have you made plans for your death?

I've had a thought about, I guess it will just be the local crematorium.

Adele has then promised to scatter my ashes in the Grand Canal

in Venice, just a small amount, you know, but in secret if necessary.

I don't know what the bylaws are.

Grand Canal in Venice, in front of a certain cafe in Paris.

Put some into a rocket to be fired over the Forth,

again, quite a small amount.

And oh, yeah, some onto a beach in Barra, Vatersay, whatever,

but not too much in any.

Most of them actually remain in the urn

and be sunk where my dad's ashes are sunk in Loch Shiel.

So wait a minute, some are going into a firework

so Iain Banks is actually going to be fired into the universe?

Oh, yeah, well into the, into the Forth, yeah.

Hmm. Yeah.

Still remaining entirely as in the atmosphere, I'm afraid, but yeah.

-Iain Banks, thank you very much.

-You're welcome.

HE CHUCKLES

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