He's away the Crow Road

I asked her if she'd ever heard Grandma Margot use the saying: away the Crow Road (or the Craw Rod, if she was being especially broad-accented that day). It meant dying, being dead. 'Aye, he's away the crow road,' meant, 'He's dead.' The Crow Road by Iain Banks 1991.

The author Iain Banks died yesterday, still far too young at 59. Since reading his first novel, The Wasp Factory, not too long after it was published in 1984 I have been something of a fan. I read a lot of The Wasp Factory while playing an alternate-turn computer game round at my then girlfriend's parents house on her father's home computer. Think the game was called Empire and was an early precursor of the Civilisation series of computer games. Once it got going your opponent took a while to move all their pieces on their turn and so you needed something to do while you waited for your turn. Housework was always an option but on one occasion I picked up a copy of The Wasp Factory and was gripped and took it away to finish it. Like much of Banks' 'conventional' fiction (as opposed to the science fiction he wrote as Iain M Banks) it is firmly rooted in a Scottish cultural identity. Something that was a little of a novelty to me in the mid-1980s when I hadn't read many novels set in a world that I knew so well. Rather like the debate today over who should run the creative arts in Scotland - should it be someone who has grown-up immersed in the shared culture of Scotland or does it matter if they were brought up elsewhere and aren't as familiar with the Scottish cultural landscape? And it's not just the big stuff that the rest of the world is already aware of, like pop music or Scottish actors, it's the little details like the adverts we all remember - does 'Nice to be quiet for a change' mean anything to you? That was what I first encountered in Banks' fiction. It felt like he was writing for me. And his characters often seemed to be versions of me, either the real me, or the me I would have liked to have been. Perhaps his women weren't always as well-drawn but even so. I still think my favourite is The Bridge with its multi-threaded narrative. I've always wondered if it was one of the inspirations for the TV series Life on Mars.
Anyway, this is my wee visual tribute - the words that seem appropriate come from The Crow Road that was dramatised on TV. In the background a trio of Banks' books lean against a whisky bottle. He had an interest in whisky - last night Twitter encouraged tweeters to raise a dram to Banks. When I left the bank, perhaps to write my own Scottish novel, one of my leaving gifts was a bottle of Jura commemorating George Orwell and the book 1984. The 1984 malt is finished, but sadly my novel isn't. Or really started in fact. And the three books reminds me of seeing little collections of Iain Banks books on other people's bookshelves. His writing - twenty-nine books  - will live on.
Everything I have seen about him says he was a good guy, even the way he dealt with his cancer diagnosis. Very dignified.
Sadly missed.
RIP