Bad Air Days: Iain Banks interview

I’m just writing what I want to read. The books sell well. There seems to be a bizarre number of people who think the same way I do, or sufficiently similar, to my great shock and surprise.”

Iain Banks is a bad advert for artistic angst. Since his first (and still his best) book The Wasp Factory appeared amidst a welter of video nasty hysteria in 1984, he’s been cranking out novels at a rate of roughly one a year, with absolutely no regard for the neurotic fussing, preening and bellybutton-picking that usually comes with the job.
“I’m slowing down now,” Banks says. “I’m only doing a book every two years, that’s the theory anyway. My age is starting to show, I think. I’m approaching my dotage.”

Bullshit, friends. Amicable bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless. Banks may be taking longer periods off between books to go pot holing, hill walking and embarking on curry and beer nights with his mates, but his last novel Dead Air was still written in six weeks flat.
“I kind of wrote Dead Air in my head to some degree in the months up to Christmas (2001),” he explains, “and then didn’t start (actually) writing it until the middle of January, and it was finished by the end of February; absolute knife-through-butter stuff. It wrote itself incredibly fast, partly because I’d had the time off to recharge the batteries but also because it’s the kind of book it is, it was always meant to be a page-turner, a thriller.”

The story is related by one Ken Notts, a mouthy, leftie, smugly self-righteous shock jock working for a London radio station, a sort of Chris Evans with elephantitis of the social conscience. Notts’ boozy, philandering existence takes a handbrake turn when he falls in love with the wife of a prominent – and vicious – London gangster, a development that rams a steel rod of tension through the spine of the often rambling narrative. But although Dead Air could’ve used some sterner editing, the damn thing is still impossible to put down, mainly because of Banks’ greatest strengths: story and characterisation.
It begins with this generation’s JFK moment, shortly after 2pm, September 11, 2001. Notts is attending the wedding brunch of some friends at the top floor of their East End loft apartment, and the celebrations are interrupted when mobile phones start shrilling Armageddon. It’s about as attention-grabbing an opening as any novelist could conceive.

But did Banks ever consider not writing about 9/11?
“Not really,” he says. “September 11 happened about three weeks before I started writing the book. Apart from everything else I was sort of knocked back emotionally, everybody was, it was a terrible thing to take on board. But it also meant that I had to alter the book, because it was about a media guy in London, it was set in the last quarter of 2001 and the first quarter of 2002 and it would be absurd not to mention it.”
So, Dead Air deals in ultra-realism, in as much as any book set in the hyper-caffeinated ant colony of broadcasting can be said to do so, and exhibits a shrewd grasp of the debilitating self-consciousness of mass media. At one point Notts is asked to go on a TV current affairs programme to confront a Holocaust denier, but first the producers vet what he’s going to say to the extent that, by the time he gets to the studio, he’s in danger of being all talked out.
“That happens all the time,” Banks affirms. “I think too many TV people are just frightened of simplicity.”

As a result of the aforementioned Holocaust denier debacle, the Notts character is hounded by tabloid journalists camped outside the radio station where he works. The insight with which Banks writes about this suggests he’s been “papped” once or twice.
“I kind of had it done to me in a very mild form as it were,” he confirms. “I was actually door-stepped by the Mail On Sunday because I’d been at this thing, Freshers’ Week at Edinburgh University Student Union or whatever, and someone had asked about drugs, and I was doing the drug rant and ended up with, ‘So kids, drugs – Just Say Yes!’ And I think someone there must’ve been a runner for the right wing papers or whatever, because it was not long after Leah Betts had died, basically of water-poisoning, not Ecstasy as such.

“And this journalist said to me, ‘How do you think Leah Betts’ mother and father would feel if they heard you saying, ‘Drugs – Just Say Yes!?’’ And I said, ‘Fuck off’. In the end this girl died because she drank – or was made to drink – too much water, that’s what killed her, it wasn’t the drug itself. You’ve got this crazy situation where if a 13 or 14 year-old steals a £20 note from their mother’s purse or their dad’s wallet, if they go to an off-license and say, ‘I want to buy a bottle of vodka’, they’ll get thrown out. But if that same child takes that same 20 quid note to a drug dealer and says, ‘I want to score some heroin’, very few heroin dealers are going to say, ‘No, you’re too young, go home’. Can you see what’s wrong with this picture?!”

As a self-professed evangelical atheist, does Banks foresee any cure for the kind of fanaticism that results in tragedies like September 11?
“There is a cure yes – reason. Education. Libraries. Teachers. Lecturers. Civilisation, that’s the cure. And a bit of hope I suppose. I mean religion is still in retreat in a sense, it’s taken heroic efforts of crass stupidity to try and justify the so-called Creation Science argument in America, which is patently ludicrous; they’re doing their damnedest, but ultimately they’re going to lose. Science just keeps doing things that religion only claims it can do – talking over long distances, live longer, live better, science can do that, religion can’t, simple as that.
“When you’re young you think within your lifetime it’s all going to be better; as you get older that’s one of these great disillusioning things is realising every generation starts out stupid just like you did! But as I say, as long as there are libraries, as long as there is education, as long as there is civilisation itself, there’s always hope.”

Dead Air is out now in paperback, published by Little, Brown