The Crow Road - Iain Banks

The Crow Road is my favourite Iain Banks novel. For a long time, when I was reading his books, I told myself not to re-read them, because they'd never be as good, never have as much mystery to them the second time around, and I'd get bored. But there are so many little things to pick up on, like a good film, that I'll probably really enjoy re-reading it again next week. Our hero is a teenager called Prentice McHoan. He's been through life like a lot of us - school, college, and now at Uni. His time there has let him get away from his family, which he was glad of, because, like most teenagers, he had fought with his father extensively and now ...  Read the complete review

If you've ever read 'The Wasp Factory' or 'Complicity', you may be under the misguided impression that Iain Banks's talent lies in the macabre and gory. Not your thing? Well, here I prescribe the perfect remedy; 'The Crow Road'. Despite being rooted in his usual style of social realism and gritty humanist themes, 'The Crow Road' is, as Banks himself states, 'a happier novel'. It's a fantastic Scottish book, so good that it was made into a successful television serial (if you're interested, I wrote a separate review on this, go on, have a read!). 'The Crow Road' begins with our protagonist, Prentice McHoan, returning home from university for the funeral of his ...  Read the complete review

‘ “…all your nonsenses and truths, your finery and squalid options, combine and coalesce, to one noise including laugh and whimper, scream and sigh, forever and forever repeating, in any tongue we care to choose, whatever lessened, separated message we want to hear. It all boils down to nothing, and where we have the means and will to fix our reference within that flux; there we are. If it has any final signal, the universe says simply, but with every possible complication, ‘Existence,’ and it neither pressures us, nor draws us out, except as we allow. Let me be part of that outrageous chaos…and I am.” ’ I ...  Read the complete review

"It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listenign to my uncle Hamish queitly snoring in harmony to bach's mass in B minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach." So begins the Crow Road - a brilliant book from Iain Banks that was also made into an excellent series on the TV not so very many years ago. Prentice, the narrator is a young man with a number of problems: His family keep dying off, his brother is marrying the girl Prentice loves, his uncle Rory is missing under suspcious circumstances. "Right, now this isn't as bad as it sounds, but ..... I was in bed ...  Read the complete review