Iain Banks - Espedair Street

review by Malcolm on show 10th March
From the cover: “Daniel Weir used to be a famous - not to say infamous - rock star. Maybe still is. At thirty-one he has been both a brilliant failure and a dull success. He's made a lot of mistakes that have paid off and a lot of smart moves he'll regret forever (however long that turns out to be). Daniel Weir has gone from rags to riches and back, and managed to hold onto them both, though not much else. His friends all seem to be dead, fed up with him or just disgusted - and who can blame them? And now Daniel Weir is all alone. As he contemplates his life, Daniel realises he only has two problems: the past and the future. He knows how bad the past has been. But the future - well, the future is something else.”

My review: the cover notes give no feeling at all for what lies within. Written by Banks around the same time as his SciFi Culture novel Consider Phlebas there are elements of the unreal leaching through into this novel too. Daniel Wier has been known as Weird since his schooldays – name on register Wier D – but he fits the description well. Tall, geeky, stuttering – uncomfortable in company of others – especially girls – at the beginning of the novel he lives in a huge church-like folly, Wykes’ Tower, built by an eccentric whose wife and infant had been killed in a train crash, but before the infant had been baptised and thus denied entry to heaven, frustrated by his failed attempts to gain the church’s redemption for his son he built his own church and populated the burial ground with graves of those who had really annoyed him – each bearing the date of their birth but not of their death – instead the date of their downfall. Sounding good so far, weird definitely?

The narrator, Weird, is looking back over his life, he’s decided to end it all. He could afford to pay cash for a nearly new jumbo jet but doesn’t have a decent pair of socks to his name. It is a rags-to-riches-to-rags again story of a Scottish lad from Paisley who wants to be a singer song writer but who doesn’t have the oomph to get it going. Until, that is, he sees a local group “Frozen Gold” and decides that his music would fit them much better than the rubbish they were playing. He wheedles his way in and is proved right, they become a huge success, and he abandons his childhood sweetheart for his new pals and the big time.

You can probably imagine what happens as one by one his friends disappear, killed in plane crashes or shot and he is left rich and alone in his huge fake church. It’s a great salutary tale of salvation with some deliciously funny moments and always Iain Banks’ own evocative writing style.

Publisher: Abacus, RRP £8.99 Amazon £6.99 Kindle £7.99. Charity shop 50p

Malcolm Martland, Broadcast on Radio Scilly 107.9 FM Book Club, 10 March 2011.