Review: Espedair Street, by Iain Banks
by Rich Horton
I really enjoy Iain M. Banks’ SF novels, particularly Use of Weapons, one of his Culture novels. I have also generally enjoyed those of his mainstream books I’ve read. This is a short look at one of those. Espedair Street is held in fairly high regard by Banks fans. It is also usually called one of his happier novels.
I must admit I was a bit taken aback, then, when the book opened with the narrator declaring that he had decided to kill himself. To be sure, he quickly assures us that he has decided to live after all.
It being a Banks book, it’s told on two timelines. Fairly traditionally: one timeline recounts the last few days in the life of Danny Weir, while the other tells the story of his life from his late teens to the present (age 31). Danny Weir, we soon gather, was the bass player and songwriter for a huge 70s/80s progressive rock band, Frozen Gold. His nickname was Weird (for Weir, D., obviously enough). The band seems to have ended under rather distressing circumstances, which don’t become clear for a long time.
In the present day thread, we learn that Danny is living a pointless existence in a mock cathedral in Glasgow, drinking his life away with Communist liquor, spending time with three not-quite-friends — a young man, a rather older man, and a prostitute. He still writes music, but not very seriously — film scores and commercial jingles. He gets drunk enough to have no idea what crazy things he might have done. He also doesn’t tell any of his friends who he really is — letting them think he is just the caretaker for Danny Weir’s property.
The other thread tells the story of Frozen Gold: how Danny more or less forced himself on the band as a songwriter (they were talented players of cover tunes), his resentment of the middle-class origins of the other members, the meteoric success of the band. Danny is extremely tall (6’6″) and he describes himself as ugly. The leaders of the band are Davey Balfour, a supremely talented guitarist, and Christine Brice, a wonderful singer. We soon gather that Davey’s risk-taking may have something to do with the band’s collapse, though Danny blames himself. There is also some sexual dynamics — Davey cheating with Danny’s girlfriend, and Danny responding with an affair with Christine (she and Davey having been a couple).
It all comes to a head when Davey is pushed to resume his career (it seems that his solo album is unexpectedly a success), but then learns some more devastating news. He feels that there is simply no point to his life — but then he — well, leave it to the novel to reveal. Yes, though, it is at least a hopeful ending, if not unambiguously happy.
I rather enjoyed the book, but with reservations. Mostly they turn on a feeling that it’s all too easy. Above all, Espedair Street seems facile. It’s hard to believe in Frozen Gold — in their success, in Danny’s brilliance as a songwriter. It’s hard to believe the tragedy that precipitates the action of the book. (The tragedy that ruined the band, on the other hand, though absurd, is believable in a weird way.) Danny’s redemption also comes too easy. The more I think about this book, and about Banks’s other books, I suspect that he is perhaps a supremely talented writer but not a great writer — that his instinct leads him too readily to facile, constructed, ultimately shallow resolutions. It may be that at his best he can transcend this — a reread of Use of Weapons may be in order — but I suspect that in the long run this facility, this tendency to neatness and to easy solutions (even the sad endings, on reflection, are “easy” in a sense) is a limit to his range. (One illustration — the nature of the human character in his Utopian Culture. The Culture is a wonderful place to live, but Banks has shied away from presenting a place inhabited by actual humans. Instead, they have been genetically engineered to be more tractable.)
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