On Iain Banks

I haven;t always been kind to Iain Banks, but now he's gone and died, grumbles about the quality of individual books tend to fade in comparison to his achievement over all. 

True, a lot of the books were either pretentious student twaddle (Espedaire Street, The Bridge, Walking on Glass) or tired an bloated (Crow Road, Dead Air, Whit). Maybe three or four of them were truly brilliant (Player of Games, Against A Dark Background, Complicity).  Which is more than you can say for most writers.

So what if he never managed to repeat the brilliance of Use of Weapons?  What matters, of course, is that he did it once.  And (at least sometimes) tried to emulate its scale.

Here is Iain Banks' final interview, shortly before his death.  Definitely worth a read, for those who have not already found there way to it.

Really drives home that while he probably wrote too much, too quickly, now that he's gone you wouldn't really have had it any other way; and what a rounded, passionate, honest human being he was, beyond the (rather variable, but all now treasurable) books.