The Crow Road

I recently finished The Crow Road by Iain Banks, sent to me as a gift by Cas (thanks again!). I wasn’t really sure how to take the opening sentence, which left me wondering what kind of book she’d sent me: “It was the day my grandmother exploded.”* However, after 30 or 40 pages, I was hooked, and proceeded to plow through it with all possible speed. I loved it.

The plot follows Prentice McHoan, a Scottish university student (who’s majoring in history, cheers to that!) who’s dealing with more than a little death in his family. Indeed, “the crow road” is (at least in the book) a Scottish phrase meaning death. He also struggles with other prominent life issues, like his love life (or largely lack thereof), his flatmate who isn’t the greatest intellect on the planet, and the rift between him and his father over religion: Prentice believes, while his father is a rather vocal atheist.

The narration style is one which I’ve not encountered much, but which I really enjoyed a lot. While the story does have Prentice at the center of action, the narration itself is quite fluid in regards to both time and perspective. Time-wise, the book leapt from one point in time to another; from Prentice’s “present”, to his childhood, to his teen years, etc. Perspective-wise, sometimes the narration was in first-person, other times third-person, focused on someone else entirely (often Kenneth, Prentice’s father). The first couple of these time / perspective shifts threw me off, but after that the transitions were painless, and livened things up.

The thing I probably enjoyed the most about the book was the sheer Scottish-ness of it. After watching the historically-horrendous Braveheart countless times in my youth, I fell in love with anything to do with Scotland, and The Crow Road stirred that love up. Reading about the lochs, the little villages, the castles, makes me want to visit the country, something I’ve not really thought about for a long while. My only trouble with going to Scotland, though, would be if Banks’ characters are a good representation of the country’s inhabitants as a whole. Do those people ever drink anything that is non-alcoholic? It seemed every other page, Prentice, friends, families, everyone was tipping back a shot of whiskey. Are they related to the Battlestar Galactica crew?

* The grandmother exploding was due to her pacemaker not being taken out before she was put into the furnace at the crematorium. The scene was pretty hilarious: the doctor drives into the crematorium lot, jumps out of his car, and starts yelling, “STOP, STOP!!!” This is followed by Prentice hearing a loud explosion from inside the crematorium as his grandmother’s pacemaker pops. Then the doc falls over, having a heart attack of his own.