The Crow Road

"Not very much, but quite a lot, simultaneously. That’s what’s so great about this book, it’s a soup with a ton of ingredients in it. It dextrously moves between focus on any one of them. One minute you’re reading a book about a family, or a young guy’s journey to find himself… you read about him falling in love, and sex scenes that you’ve never read before. But then there’s this murder mystery: his uncle disappeared, and he will occasionally talk about it. And I’ve never read another book that’s done this – have a mystery, but it’s not the driving point of the story, it’s just one of the many elements. You come back to it whenever he wants; you get invested and interested in it, but somehow when he moves away, you don’t mind. In most mystery books, as soon as you move away from the mystery for anything, you feel, like: ‘just get back to the mystery, tell me who did it.’ This isn’t because it’s a dull mystery. It’s not even because it’s not a piece of the book that’s important. It’s because every element of the book is working perfectly together. They’re all interesting: I want to know about his relationships, I want to know what’s happening between him and his father, and with his new girlfriend, with his grandmother. “There must have been an agent somewhere saying, ‘Just carry on doing more space opera!’ And he’d say, ‘no, no, this one’s about capitalism’” Also: it’s not linear. It keeps hopping about – forwards, backwards, all over the show. Telling a story in a non-linear fashion is incredibly difficult. But to do that for a mystery at the same time, it’s an incredible feat. I think, actually, that this book would have informed Evelyn , because I read this book for the first time when I was 20-something. It’s utterly wonderful, brilliant. And different to a lot of Iain Banks’s canon as well. It’s very ambitious. I remember thinking: ‘Oh! You can do this with a novel! It can be this !” It doesn’t have to be about one thing, it can be about multiple things. It goes back to what we said earlier – as long as you’re fair with your reader, as long as you’re keeping them recapped and up-to-date, giving them some indication of where they are in the story, you can get away with that. So, it’s the structure, and the way it treats the mystery – and the way that dovetails with all the other elements. He took a swing, as well. He had solid hits, but then the next book would be something else entirely. Like The Wasp Factory, as a starting book. Then later he had The Business . He wrote all these books about different things, and he would mess with structure if he felt like messing with structure. I love that. I love how brave he was in his writing. There must have been an editor or an agent somewhere being like, ‘Just carry on doing more space opera.’ And then he’d say, ‘no, no, this one’s going to be about capitalism.’"