The Crow Road, probably Iain Banks's best-known novel, ends with an informal christening party on top of a high building. Dead Air begins with an informal wedding reception on top of a high building. Instead of a Scottish castle, the high building is an old lead foundry, converted into flats and artists' studios, in the east London docklands.
The narrator, Ken Nott, is an expat Clydesider who works as a shock-jock at the fictitious Capital Live! radio station. Coked up to the gills, he and his friend Amy start dropping fruit off the penthouse balcony into the car park eight storeys below: "I let the apple go. It tumbled very slowly, almost disappearing. It hit the asphalt and exploded in a highly satisfactory manner."
Other guests join in, dropping furniture and bottles of Tesco Cava that the residents want to get rid of anyway. The mess doesn't matter, as the whole place is being redeveloped next week. The hilarity stops when everybody's mobile phones go off. "'What?' 'New York?' . . . 'The World Trade Center?' . . . 'A plane? What, a big plane . . . ?'"
No one offers the opinion that was in fact widely touted in London media circles that afternoon: "The where-were-you-when-you-heard scene is going to be such a huge cliche in novels about a year from now, isn't it?"
Just as well. A degree of unashamed naffness is part of Banks's ever-readable style. The blitzing of New York is incidental, chucked in as a contemporary reference. The story is about Ken's dangerous liaison with Celia, the wife of a very major gangster. Ken meets her, in flashback, at a party given by the magnate who owns Capital Live!. Celia has an interesting fernlike scar, where she was struck by lightning at the age of 14, and hair "the colour of heroin". This reader went nearly 200 pages thinking that the experience with the thunderbolt must have turned her hair as white as the contraband powder in cop films. I was forgetting about the old Stranglers song. Eventually, a mention of her "brown-gold hair" clears the matter up.
Much of the book consists of Ken's rants, on air and off. These are perhaps not quite as radical or entertaining as they should be. "Liberals. The chattering classes. Political correctness. Basically I'm for 'em." So, and? Ken spends three pages hectoring his ex-wife, who's quarter-Jewish, about the plight of the Palestinians. The point here is that he's being a bit boorish, but it is laboured.
There are some grimly studenty debates about religion and some agreeably studenty debates about trivia like the special effects in Band of Brothers: "proper explosions . . . a single flash and stuff flying everywhere, rather than all this vaporised petrol". Where the narrator of The Crow Road railed against the Gulf war as a "grotesque malfeasance", Ken keeps mercifully quiet about Afghanistan, apart from bragging that he's always criticised the Taliban.
The climax comes when Ken has to burgle the Belgravia mansion that Celia shares with her uber-gangster husband. They are away but due back soon, and Ken has drunkenly gone and left an incriminating, sexual message for Celia on the answerphone which he must wipe at all costs.
Ken cannot believe what he's done, and nor can the reader. But Banks cleverly confronts the problem. Ken riffs: "There were physical laws, immutable rules written into the very warp and woof of reality itself, which would prevent any supposedly sentient creature doing anything a tenth as cretinously, murderously insane as that." OK. On second thoughts, it's so bonkers, it just might happen.
Hugo Barnacle is a novelist and critic
