Iain Banks lifts a corduroy trouser leg to reveal a nasty-looking scar line just below his kneecap. It’s the last physical mark of the best-selling author’s rock’n’roll days as he renounces his decades of high-octane, health-shunning hedonism and embraces rather calmer ways of greener, cleaner living.
Since Banks first found literary fame in 1984 with The Wasp Factory, his novels have cleaved into two genres. His mainstream works tend to star sex-obsessed young men rattling with drink and drugs, while his science-fiction novels (written as Iain M. Banks) frequently feature a future civilisation called the Culture, which is founded on the rational and the good. In the past, Banks’s habits have shared much with his bad-boy mainstream protagonists, but now the Culture’s influence may be ascendant.
Not that Banks, who is 54 this month, had ever affected a bad-boy image. The tall, greying man who strides into an Edinburgh hotel bar for our interview is dressed, as ever, like a holidaying academic, in brown cords, dusty brown shoes and a green graph-paper check shirt.
Such self-effacing garb belies the fact that until recently he had a garage reportedly stacked with £150,000 worth of seriously flash motor cars, including Porsches, Jags, top-power BMWs and a souped-up Land Rover 4x4. The author of 12 mainstream novels and ten sci-fi ones (the latest in the Culture series, Matter, was launched this week) also admits to having tried most illegal drugs, with the exception of heroin, and drunk 80 bottles of single malt while researching Raw Spirit, a book about Scotland and its whiskies. He also loves motorbikes.
Or, he loved motorbikes. Last September he failed to negotiate (in police parlance) a tight corner on his 800cc sportsbike and smacked into a crash barrier, wrecking the bike and nearly himself with it. “I was lucky. It could have been a lot worse,” he says, looking up sheepishly from the dented weal in his leg, which was his only serious injury. “I decided it was a yellow card – that I’d become rusty and lost my skills. So I’ve given up motorbiking.”
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Thus, the motorcycle went the same way as Banks’s powerful cars. Last year he replaced the supercar fleet with a much greener Lexus RX 400h hybrid vehicle. But then he realised it was “ridiculously huge; a real Chelsea tractor” and downsized even more – to a little diesel Toyota Yaris shopping car.
Banks, suddenly green? How? “Bloody New Scientist and Scientific American,” he laughs. “Reading them for years made me think, ‘All right, all right.’ There’s now so many scientists behind the theory of global warming that the consensus is there, whereas the theory originally started out in the realms of nutterdom. I’ve had my fun with all the Porsches and that. I can’t ignore the scientific consensus. It’s climate change, and it’s us what done it. So I’ve changed, just so I can look my nieces and nephews in the eye in years to come.”
He has also given up flying – he travels by train wherever possible – but he’s quick to point out that he’s a reluctant eco-warrior: “I would like nothing more than to be told authoritatively that vast, fast powerful cars, preferably with turbos, and jetting all over the world are actually good for the planet and for society.”
Banks is open about his marriage split
Eco-consciousness is not Banks’s only act of redemption. He says he has also cut down his drinking and has begun to embrace healthy exercise. Now this wouldn’t have anything to do, perchance, with the fact that he has split from his wife, Annie, after 25 years together and subsequently met a new partner? He’s heard this question before: “Because I’ve given up the cars, people have decided that my new girlfriend, Adele, persuaded me to do it,” he says.
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“Anyone who saw her face when I told her, ‘No more rides in Porsches,’ would know that’s not the case.” Banks, who has no children, seems quite matter-of-fact about his relationship upheavals. “My wife and I are getting divorced. It’s amicable so far,” he says, deadpan.
“It was nice to be alone for a while, then I found another relationship.”
Banks’s adoption of exercise is perhaps as big a turnaround as his renunciation of fast cars. Ten years ago, when asked how much exercise he took, he bluffly replied, “None whatsoever. I occasionally deign to walk up the stairs of my house.” Now he has taken up hillwalking. “The pounds go on too easily when you get older,” he shrugs. “I love walking by myself, so I don’t do dangerous stuff like going far into the wilds where no one could find me. It’s mostly the local hills of Fife and Perthshire.
“I just love that. It replaces the motorbike as a way to get out and away by myself. There’s a steep hill just outside my front door, it’s 253 steps from the village up to the Forth Bridge, and once or twice a week I make the trip up there, too. So I’m almost on a health programme. Well, not really. I do eat bran in the morning and try to eat my five fruit and veg every day. But I still love my weekly curries.”
If he has signed up to the church of green and the temple of fitness, he remains staunchly opposed to any kind of religion. “I’m an evangelical atheist,” he says. “Religions are cultural artifacts. We make God, not the other way round.”
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Banks says the roots of his beliefs lie in his upbringing; he was raised in Fife by a churchgoing mother and a rationalist father. “Dad was an atheist, as was his dad before him. I used to think that dads just didn’t come to church. Then one day I asked him why he didn’t attend and he said he didn’t believe in God. I was agape. I found it fascinating. Religion is one way to explain the Universe, but eventually science comes along and explains it.”
“America is psychotic with religion”
Banks admits to having had one period of spiritual exploration: “I did backslide into religiosity briefly in my teens. But I can remember walking down the street in May 1963 to the local shop on an errand and trying to work out how the world had been formed. I thought that Sooty must have magicked it with his wand. Then I wondered what Sooty can have been standing on, in this unformed Universe, in order to create it. And who made Sooty? That’s when atheism came thundering through me.”
So if religion is so risible, why oppose it so strenuously? “This stuff really matters because America is psychotic with religion,” he says, strident but still affable. “I think we make our own meaning. It’s about truth and honesty, rather than something that was set up 2,000 years ago and which says that it’s true. Reason is all we have. If we can’t rely on our reason, we can’t rely on anything at all. We’re not the only animals capable of reasoning – monkeys and dolphins can do it – but we can do it better than anything else. It makes us who we are.”
But if we’re in a Godless, meaningless Universe, why not just let the planet burn down in a furnace of hedonism anyway? “I’m a humanist as well as an atheist,” he says. “I stick to the idea that life is good and death is bad, in the vast majority of circumstances. Morality is about preventing suffering, it’s not about pleasure. One of my sci-fi novel’s first lines is, ‘The only sin is selfishness.’ That’s the only true original sin. Humanism is about trying to reduce the amount of suffering in the world. Humanism’s about human values, and things the majority of people who aren’t psychotic would agree to. It’s basic militant liberalism.”
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And these are the ideals encapsulated in the Culture series of his sci-fi books. “The assumptions about the society called the Culture are based on the fact that it’s a rationalist society,” he says. “The Culture is the most advanced civilisation in my sci-fi novels; they alter their genetic inheritance to make themselves sane and not genocidal, as we often seem to be. They also create machines so intelligent that they can save people from themselves. We have a lot to learn from them.” Indeed; but meanwhile we are surely at a depressing point in history for humanists? Banks nods ruefully. “People like me have to be careful of not getting too despairing about the way the world is at the moment. There’s suffering, starvation, etc, and it’s a very poor comment on us as a species. We had a golden age for a time between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, but we didn’t really notice it. We could have done so much better with that time. I can easily imagine sci-fi circumstances such as a nuclear terrorist attack on America prompting the absolute rise to power of the neo-conservatives – and climate change happening at the same time.”
Then Banks brightens, shrugs and announces: “Things could get a lot worse. Even now things aren’t that bad. There’s more people than ever before around now and more having fun and getting on with their lives. We’ve not yet moved back into the age of barbarism. And I still believe in space travel. Let’s get off this planet and get into space, stop having all our eggs in the same basket. Then we can really start to develop and grow. Currently, I’m a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. That way you don’t get any nasty surprises.”
Matter (Orbit, £18.99) is available from Times BooksFirst for £17.10, p&p free: 0870 1608080 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst