Stephen McGinty: A bookshelf full of memories

IN THE tens of thousands of words dedicated to the subject of Iain Banks this week, I have failed to notice one important phrase: the “man bag”. For, unless I am mistaken, the first time I saw this most debonair and continental of contraptions was not in the heat-sealed pages of GQ as toted by a male model with chiselled cheek bones but slung over the shoulder of this most brilliant and bearded of authors.

Now, I’m not talking about one of those large leather satchels that we all must cart around to carry our various electronic gadgetry, but a small pouch on a strap in the style of, well, a lady’s handbag.

My memory, and I accept it could be playing tricks in a desperate attempt to conjure up a career-ending lawsuit from the sartorially insulted, is that it was in the late spring or summer of 1998. We had arranged to meet at a bar/cafe above Waverley train station in Edinburgh, where Banks had taken up residence for the day to conduct a round of interviews to promote Inversions. The “man bag” sat on the table, or perhaps it was the chair, during our chat and then at the end he hoisted it over his shoulder and prepared to stride off towards Princes Street like a well-dressed Parisian.

I remember thinking that it was a look that required confidence. Exactly why this image has risen up through the depths of my memory to ping ping ping on the surface like a distress buoy from a stricken submarine is unclear. The second image I have of him is from an old photograph, now lost. It was taken in 1989 in the Edinburgh flat to which Banks moved after returning from London. He is sitting with his arms folded at his word processor, an Amstrad two-disk drive, and looking up towards the camera and smiling. The reason I remember the photograph so well is that I took it.

I was a copyboy at the Evening Times and in an attempt to chisel my way into journalism was working in my spare time as a freelance writer for Fear magazine, Britain’s answer to Fangoria, the American horror magazine whose speciality was the bloodiest photographs from the goriest new movies.

Fear had a more literary flair – partly as Britain had more genre authors than films – and frequently delved into science fiction. I had written to Banks to request an interview and he had generously invited me over. I can still remember hiking up Lothian Road from Haymarket Station on a freezing winter morning and that distinctive smell of hops and barley from the brewery, a scent unfamiliar to the native Glaswegian.

Banks was helpful and patient and offered me whisky, which I foolishly declined. Journalists, like most people, remember small kindnesses and although I was an aspiring rookie reaching up towards the first rung on the ladder, he treated me with every courtesy and consideration.

From then on, Iain Banks was bracketed as one of the “good guys” in that universal shorthand applicable to any profession or encounter: “good guy or bad guy”. (Terry Pratchett also fell into the former category after consenting to an interview when I was a 15-year-old schoolboy and then, when I posted him a copy to check the quotes, rewriting it for me on the grounds that it might help to “crispen up a few of the paragraphs”.)

To judge by the outpouring of appreciation and thanks triggered by Wednesday’s announcement that Banks is “officially, Very Poorly” I am clearly not alone in my opinion. It is no exaggeration to say in offices and homes around the world shoulders slumped, heads hung low and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people uttered an angry, depressed sigh and said: “ah for f***’s sake!” From Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist who used his New York Times blog to say what the rest of us were feeling – “this is very upsetting” – to the fan who wrote on the author’s site“thank you for your works and the great impressions you have made on my life and the unutterably enormous, gravity-pulling realms of big cosmos stuttering f…ing joy that your amazing brain has conjured for me and so many”, it is clear Banks means a great deal to a great many people, but why?

Well, we have grown up with Iain Banks. If you are a certain age, middle-aged as I depressingly now am, you discovered The Wasp Factory as a teenager when the disturbed antics of Frank Cauldhame and his island home ringed by sacrifice poles left a seismic impression on your psyche and the surprise ending, a decade before The Crying Game, made you ponder what Banks was on and could you possibly have a pint, too. If the Wasp Factory made you think about the Scottish landscape in a different way, the majesty of The Bridge, a fit of literary engineering every bit as precise as its namesake, the Forth Rail Bridge, allowed you to glimpse a Scots Manhattan among the rivets and girders and, in the process, made you – well, me at least – feel a little bit smarter than you actually were. (I’ve always loved Bank’s description of the book, which he considers his masterpiece, as the one that was “sent to university and got a First”.) By Espedair Street, you were falling in and out of love and enjoying the reflections on relationships and music as much as you once did the pipe bombs and catapults of his debut.

And so it went on, over the past 29 years, Banks has released a book each year. In the 1990s, you could not be considered a literate Scot if your shelves did not display all his paperbacks in their distinctive black and white livery. The older we got, the more disposable income we accrued, the greater the likelihood of us splashing out on a hardback.

Many fans wrote on his site that his were the only books they bought in hardback immediately on publication. One fan said that each Christmas his wife presented him with a new book stamped by the growing footprints of their two young sons: “They are amongst my most treasured possession.”

If Tutti Frutti united Scots around the television in the 1980s, then BBC Scotland’s adaptation of The Crow Road did the same service in the 1990s and introduced a new generation to his strange domestic tales and, if they dared and persevered, the rich rewards of his “space opera” science fiction series.

Words pour out of Iain Banks, who has always felt that three months was quite enough time to take care of his publisher’s annual literary needs, leaving the rest of the year left over for play. And it is his laid-back attitude and relaxed good humour that further endears him to fans at literary festivals around the country.

So, why are we feeling upset at news of his fatal illness? It is because he has been a constant in our lives for almost 30 years, because we’ve taken him and his annual offering for granted, because now there is only one book left and because, deep down, we know where he is going, we will one day follow.

It is a strange thing to watch a writer announce his imminent departure. Thursday’s news reminded me of watching Melvyn Bragg interview Dennis Potter on Channel 4 when the playwright said he was dying of cancer and that he had named the tumour, Rupert after the media tycoon Murdoch. Afterwards Potter returned to his study to crank out Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, when to judge by the later reaction of viewers, he might have been better off enjoying the blossom outside his window of which he had so movingly spoken.

Banks seems to have the better idea and is, as I type, honeymooning in Italy. As an atheist, Banks has spoken about the need not to fear death but to accept it as part of “the totality of life” and I admire his stoicism and the black humour in which he asked his partner to marry him and “do me the honour of becoming my widow”.

He is in a grim, but unique position in that he has, in a way, been able to read his own obituary. What I genuinely hope is that he will be able to take some comfort in the thousands of lives he has touched, the people he has made laugh and whom he has entertained. There is an intimacy between an author and a reader, a strange bond and, though I would wish him to recover – as we all would – if this is not possible, I’m pleased that over the next few months readers can tell him what he means to them.

We are in this strange endgame where we get to wave at him and he can wave back as he heads off down The Crow Road.