Bookshops & Banks

Iain Banks

I should say that the highlight of working in a charity shop is my contribution - however slight - to raising money for a good cause. But, truth be told, weeks can go by without me considering what actually is the purpose of my being in the shop.

No, it’s talking to customers about books that keeps me coming back. And hopefully that is reciprocated.

Today we had a donated to us a load of books by Iain Banks. Banks was a Scottish author, a Fifer born in Dunfermline, whose disturbing coming of age debut novel The Wasp Factory was published in 1984. Over the next 29 years he would go on to write a further 13 novels, several of which including The Crow Road (opening line “It was the day my grandmother exploded.”), were adapted for TV or film. However, unusually - perhaps uniquely - under the name Iain M. Banks, he had a very successful parallel career as a science fiction writer including the massively popular nine volume Culture series. Between the two genres he averaged one novel a year.

The donation contained a good mix, including a couple of nice first editions. I had no sooner priced and shelved them all when a customer appeared at the till clutching one of the Culture paperbacks, the only one of the nine he didn’t have. All of Banks’ books are still in print and easily obtainable, but I know that feeling of discovering a particular volume by chance in a charity bookshop, especially - and not everyone will understand this - if it is the original print run with the original cover. Small things like these matter.

We got chatting, we were of much the same age, and like thousands of others our entry point to the world of Iain Banks had been 40 years ago with psychopathic Frank on an unnamed remote Scottish island in The Wasp Factory. But from there our stories diverged. For me it was Walking on Glass, The Bridge and Espedair Street, for him Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons. But what we both agreed on was that the death of Banks at the age of only 59 in 2013 was a huge loss to Scottish literature. Banks was also a thoroughly decent man: in the week that he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he took time to explain why he was supporting a cultural boycott of Israel. That article is still available to read here.

I don’t usually lend books, concerned that I won’t get them back. Shortly after reading The Wasp Factory for the first time, I lent it to someone. Never got it back. Bought another copy, read it, lent it to someone else. Never got it back. I like to think that says more about the quality of Iain Banks’ writing than the honesty of my friends.

1985 paperback edition of The Wasp Factory © National Library of Scotland