I read this through tears. Free-flowing, noisy, bleary, snotty tears. Tears for Iain Banks, who will now never write another glorious masterpiece of a book. Tears for me, and the girl I once was – the girl who read all of his books the first time around. The girl in the cold flat with no central heating and never any tea bags, who kept warm on the promise of the future, in the pub on the corner.
And tears for grandmother, of course, because she exploded.
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
I love The Crow Road now as much as I did when I first read it, when it was published in 1992.
Reading Iain Banks’ writing is like slipping into a warm, softly-scented bubble bath, or drinking a mug of hot chocolate by the fire on an icy-cold snowy night. Seriously, I could read and re-read his books forever. Iain Banks is my desert island author.
The Crow Road is a Scottish Bildungsroman about young protagonist, Prentice, finding his way through life with the help of sex and drugs, and stumbling into a dark family mystery, and setting out on the ultimate adult’s adventures in death. ‘The Crow Road’ as an expression is a metaphor for death, and death stalks the pages from the very beginning, when grandmother, Prentice tells us, exploded.
It’s a book about stories – the stories of Prentice and his family, the opaque mystery of his Uncle, who has disappeared, leaving only some papers lying around for Prentice to obsess over.
What strikes me most, when I’ve come to re-read this most gorgeous book, is the stark black humour that had me choking over my hot chocolate, and the warmth of the writing: reading about the family and its mysteries and secrets is to live with them for a while, and though there have been many, many fabulous books in the intervening twenty-five years, reading The Crow Road again put me back in a place where reading, and feeling part of the book itself, part of the lives of the characters, was, and is, the centre of everything.
I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.
Jane's Book Reviews and Reading Blog 