The Crow Road by Iain Banks
Banks Never Disappoints
It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium,
listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach’s Mass in
B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me
back to Gallanach.
So begins Iain Banks’ The Crow Road, the tale of Prentice McHoan and
his complex but enduring Scottish family. Prentice, preoccupied with
thoughts of sex, death, booze, drugs, and God, has returned to his home
village of Gallanach full of questions about the McHoan past, present, and
future.

When his beloved Uncle Rory disappears, Prentice becomes obsessed
with the papers Rory left behind — the notes and sketches for a book
called The Crow Road. With the help of an old friend, Prentice sets out to
solve the mystery of his uncle’s disappearance, inadvertently confronting
the McHoans’ long association with tragedy — an association that includes
his sister’s fatal car crash and his father’s dramatic death by lightning.
The Crow Road is a coming-of-age story as only Iain Banks could write —
an arresting combination of dark humor, menace, and thought-provoking
meditations on the nature of love, mortality, and identity.
Personal Review: The Crow Road by Iain Banks
Taking the Crow Road is a vivid and startling Scottish expression meaning
dying. How the expression originated I have never known, but I used to
know the literal Crow Road very well. It is in Glasgow, it climbs northwards
from Dumbarton Road, winds through Broomhill Cross and finishes in a flat
and straight section, ending where it meets Great Western Road at
Anniesland Cross. One distinctive feature of Banks's style - one that I find
rather engaging - is his fascination with places and place-names, and in
fact the metaphorical expression is hardly used here in the book, whereas
the real Crow Road features by name far more than anything in the story
calls for.
Six of the characters in the book take the Crow Road, five of them
definitely not from natural causes and the sixth probably not. The book is
not primarily about people dying, the deaths are all part of a kind of
McHoan Saga centred on Prentice McHoan as a university student but
also full of flashbacks to his childhood and even to episodes in the history
of his extended family in which he takes no part. The first comment I
should make on the novel is therefore that this tricky narrative technique is
very well handled indeed. It all stays coherent, and the only time that I
wondered whether the author had left a thread dangling was at the bit
where Aunty Janice (a Crow Road dweller for no particular reason other
than to mention the Crow Road) is looking red-eyed with Gav standing
sheepishly in the background.
The other novel that I have read by plain Iain Banks (without the epenthetic
M that he uses as a `science fiction' writer) is Whit. Like Whit, The Crow
Road gradually turns into a detective story, only a better one. Again as in
Whit, there is a plethora of incidental detail here, and again I think Banks
does it better here. There is no sense of padding this time, and it adds
colour to the narration. I suppose I can award myself a small pat on the
back for realising that the man who can't pronounce his own name
mentioned by the drunken chatterers at a party is Colin Powell, but that
one was easy. One detail that might raise an attentive reader's eyebrows
but which is incontrovertibly true is that there are fossilised tree-stumps
millions of years old in Glasgow. I used to live only 5 minutes' walk from

them, and you will find them at the western end of Whiteinch Victoria Park
near Danes Drive. In particular the author's fascination with places is here
again, and particularly with railways. What is it with Banks and railways? In
Whit he hangs some of the narrative round the atmospheric remains of a
cross-country line of transcendental pointlessness - and consequently of
intense interest to railway antiquarians and fossil-hunters - but mistakenly
has one end of it at Bridge of Allan instead of Stirling. I supposed that this
was just a slip, but now I'm less sure. In the first place he concocts a
railway that never was near Loch Fyne, and I have no idea why, for all it
really adds to the story or the background. After that he does a very odd
thing with it in Glasgow. Trains using this imaginary line would join the
Helensburgh suburban tracks at Craigendoran and diverge from them after
Westerton, with the local traffic continuing via Anniesland and the highland
trains via Maryhill, meeting the Edinburgh main line at Cowlairs. For some
reason Mr Banks has Prentice's train routed rightly through Maryhill and
correctly trying to join the Edinburgh tracks, but then magics it back to
Anniesland. The reason for doing this, I soberly believe, was to work in
another mention of the Crow Road.
Interesting to the author and to me, that kind of detail, but of less certain
interest to his readership generally, I suppose. By any general tests for
quality as a novel and as writing, The Crow Road comes through with what
they call flying colours. The characters all have real individuality, they are
all very credible, and there are plenty of them. The narrative is full of life,
as if the author enjoys what he does. There are 500 pages of it, but the
atmosphere of Scotland is captured very attractively, whatever the various
Scots get up to, notably alcoholic excesses with a variety of
consequences. As with Whit, I was enjoying the book more as I went
along, and the memory of the real Crow Road aroused my sentimentality
enough to push its dark counterpart into the background.
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