The Vision of Proliferating Crime in Iain Banks’s Fiction

book chapter

English

Even though issues of crime may be found in almost any of Iain Banks’s novels, the critical reception and scholarly writing on his fiction seem to ignore this area. Critical reception is often limited to the inspection of the issues of violence, politics, sexuality and anti war convictions. In this paper I mean to gather these issues under the umbrella term of crime which connects them all in Banks’s fiction. Out of his numerous novels I have chosen three, The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993), Canal Dreams (1989), A Song of Stone (1997), which are part of his mainstream writing, and put them into logical, not chronological, sequence in order to illustrate what I call the vision of proliferating crime. The novels I have chosen paint a clear picture of crime as it gradually seizes all areas of society. I define crime as restricting another person’s freedom in performing the act of sovereignty which allows me to put the four novels in a continuum with rising potency and presence of crime. Banks’s vision of crime is that of an unpunishable, enduring and self perpetuating force, which, however, resides within human beings and finally rules and controls all levels of society. Banks’s fiction thus presents a bleak view of the world in which all safeguards, like government, law and justice, keep failing. The only means of survival is crime. Iain Banks offers his characters the only choice of either participating in the system of crime or retaining humanity and becoming victims sentenced to extinction, which yields an atmosphere of despair.

Iain Banks; The Crow Road; Complicity; Canal Dreams; A Song of Stone; crime novel; socially committed fiction

VRÁNOVÁ, M.

23. 12. 2018

AMERICANA eBooks

Szeged, Hungary

978-615-5423-52-9

Crime and Detection in Contemporary Culture

1

35

52

18

https://ebooks.americanaejournal.hu/books/crime-and-detection-2/