Book Review: “The Crow Road” by Iain Banks

I decided to read “The Crow Road” by Iain Banks because when I was interviewed by Aphra Behn, she mentioned she thought I would enjoy it.  I put a request for it on Bookmooch, and for a wonder it was available.   It came to me all the way from Australia, which pleased my sense of irony.  The scene in the book that made Aphra think of me was one where the main protagonist Prentice and his friend Ashley visit a place that is special to her:

Ash bent down, and I saw one pale hand at first stroke the grass, and then dig down, delving into the soil itself.  She squatted like that for a moment, then pulled her hand free, rose, brushing earth from her long white fingers.

‘This is the Ballast-Mound, the World-Hill, Prentice,’ she said, and I could just make out her small thin smile by the light of the gibbous moon.  ‘When the ships came here, from all over the world, for whatever it was they were shipping from here at the time, they would sometimes arrive unladen, just ballast in them; you know?’

She looked at me.  I nodded. ‘Ballast; yeah, I know what ballast is; stops ships doing a Herald of Free Enterprise.’ 

‘Just rocks, picked up from wherever the ship last set sail from,’ Ash said, looking to the west again.  ‘But when it got here they didn’t need it, so they dumped it –‘

‘Here?’ I breathed, looking at the modest mound with new respect.  ‘Always here?’

‘That’s what my grampa told me, when I was a bairn,’ Ash said.  ‘He used to work in the docks.  Rolling barrels, catching slings, loading sacks and crates in the holds; drove a crane, later.’ (Ashley pronounced the word ‘cran’, in the appropriate Clyde-side manner.)  I stood amazed; I wasn’t supposed to be getting ashamed at my lack of historical knowledge until Monday, back at Uni.

‘”Hen,” he’d say, “Ther’s aw ra wurld unner yon tarp a grass.”‘

I watched from one side as Ashley smiled, remembering.  ‘I never forgot that; I’d come out here by myself when I was a kid, just to sit here and think I was sitting on rocks that had once been a bit of China, or Brazil, or Australia, or America. . .’

Ash squatted down, resting on her heels, but I was whispering, ‘. . .or India,’ to myself just then, and for one long swim-headed instant my veins seemed to run with ocean-blood, dark and carrying as the black water sucking at the edges of the tumbledown wharf beneath us.   I thought, God, how we are connected to the world!, and suddenly found myself thinking about Uncle Rory again; our family connection to the rest of the globe, our wanderer on the planet.  I stared up at the broken face of the moon, dizzy with wonder and a hunger to know.

That is just a taste of the beautiful writing and characterization to be found in this book.  One of the salient points of Iain Banks writing is his way of weaving the story and plot by means of flashbacks.   At first this bothered me, it seemed contrived and was difficult to follow.   Perhaps I have become a lazy reader, just wanting entertainment without intellectual effort.  Then one day I was driving somewhere, and something I saw reminded me of an event long ago in my past.   Thinking about that event led me to reminisce about an old friend I hadn’t seen for a long time, that led to another thought –and then suddenly I was snapped back to the present by another driver cutting me off.   That moment made me realize that all the changes of time and place in this book made sense.  It is the way our minds work all the time.  So I forgave the author for forcing me to pay such close attention.

The story is that of a quest to solve a mysterious disappearance.   But there is more.  Prentice needs to find his purpose.   He is embroiled in a disastrous fight with his father, an avowed atheist, because Prentice has cast off the light of reason and embraced religious faith.  Prentice suffers the agonies of a crush; how he survives the inevitable humiliation of being “dumped” (I use this term advisedly since he never was actually “with” the object of his affections) and finds his true love is twisted and woven in with his search for the truth of what became of his Uncle Rory.   And in the midst of it all other family events become clear as well. 

This is a tale well worth reading.   It made me think hard about subjects I had taken for granted I “knew” where I stood on.  It has been a long time since I read slower and slower the closer I got to the end of a book, not wanting it to end.   And when I finished it, I turned it over and began it again.

Highly recommended.