Stonemouth - Iain Banks

Having recently read The Crow Road I pounced on this, his penultimate novel.  Actually it covers much of the same ground as The Crow Road - young Highlander returns home from the city to face his demons - but handles it in a very different way.  In Stonemouth (which is the name of the 'toun') the rich folk are actually drug runners with aspirations of gentility.  The Murston family ran young Stewart out of town five years ago for gross disrespect.  Only now is he allowed back, paradoxically to pay his respects at the funeral of the patriarch Old Joe Murston.  But there are terms - the funeral's on Monday and Stewart is expected to head back south first thing on Tuesday.  Or else.

And so the story in folds in past and present, and indeed in past and present tense.  In many ways it is a conventional novel but Banks was not a conventional novelist and he always manages to charge his stories with wit, imagination and even a sort of mystical mystery.  I am hooked.  Happily I have already acquired my next Banks novel.

The Crow Road - Iain Banks

I'm ashamed to say I was only inspired to seek out a Banks novel by the rather impressive way he handled his early death.  I'm also abashed to realise that such a great writer was out there - and I, who fancies himself a litterateur - hadn't read him.

I had, of course, seen the BBC dramatization of The Crow Road back in the Nineties (which the Beeb, for pretty much the reasons given above, recently repeated).  I liked the TV version but it's nowhere near as good as the book.  The blurb on the front touts Banks as an 'imaginative' novelist.  What's that supposed to mean?  Well in this case it means a novelist who can imagine the world of part of a Highland community in such detail that he can even describe the inner workings of a piece of constructivist modern art.  The three families focussed on have such a depth of backstory that every twist and turn of their interconnections seems to have been mapped.  There is a central mystery but that's only really the fuel that keeps Prentice, our hero, peeling back the layers.  When the mystery is finally resolved it seems almost irrelevant - and yet it completes the novel.

Five hundred pages plus and I can only find one fault.  What is the point of the third McHoan brother, the one unsurprisingly deleted from the TV dramatization?  It seems odd that someone with so vivid a vision should keep trundling him onto our shared imaginative stage for no good reason.

I loved this book.  I will seek out more.  I might even try the sci-fi.