The Steep Approach to Garbadale
Iain Banks
390 pages
published in 2007
A few days ago Roz Kaveney, in a review of Bank’s latest Culture novel, argued that it’s the Iain M. Banks science fiction novels are his serious contribution to literature, while the conventional literary novels he writes as Iain Banks are “more frivolous and irresponsible”. Not a new idea for us science fiction fans perhaps, but she was writing for the Times Literary Supplement after all, and they require baby steps. Which is to say, in a rather roundabout way, that The Steep Approach to Garbadale for all its bluster is not a very serious book, but more an, as Graham Greene would say, entertainment.
Which doesn’t make it a bad book, of course, just that it isn’t another Wasp Factory. it is in fact somewhat of a remake of The Crow Road, another saga about a large sprawling Scottish family with deep dark secret at its core. Something Banks had said he has a weakness for. Where The Steep Approach to Garbadale differs is that it has much less dark humour – no exploding grandmothers here.