80 Books No.9: The Crow Road by Iain Banks

I best knew Iain Banks from a teenage flirtation with The Wasp Factory when I was doing my A Levels. It’s a pretty standard rite of passage for a Literature student to read the tale of child murder and then finish it with a ‘what on earth is wrong with this man?’ kind of reaction.

Since then I haven’t read another novel, assuming they’d all be quite depraved and depressing. Then, last week, I bit the bullet and borrowed The Crow Road from the school library. I expected a hard slog and for it to possibly be the first book I abandoned in 2013.

Instead, I got my read of the year so far.

Set in the lead up to the Gulf War, this is the story of a Scottish student called Prentice and the seemingly never-ending deaths in his family. Across the novel, no less than five members of his family meet a grisly end, beginning with his grandma who explodes at her funeral: I kid you not. This statistic becomes less shocking when you realise that the novel covers some forty years of life in a small Scottish village, ranging from Prentice now, to Prentice as a child, to his father as a child.

Finally, I’ve found a character I like in 2013. Prentice is far from perfect and not even that extraordinary: a history student who rows with his dad and drinks far too much. Yet he is endearing and a perfect narrator for this novel which is part coming-of-age, part murder mystery. The ending is a little messy and the whole premise does really hinge on an unlikely coincidence, but I didn’t care. I thoroughly enjoyed this from start to finish, even when it got briefly bogged down in the standard anti-Thatcherite politics that seem to typify books set in this era.

This was an accessible and easy read, and I think most people would enjoy it (whereas my next book might not appeal to most people over the age of sixteen…). It’s sort of a more intelligible Irvine Welsh novel with less drugs and more likeable characters.

I reckon this will make my top five of the year.