View source for The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks

{{infobox1 
|title= The Steep Approach to Garbadale
|author= Iain Banks
|reviewer= Magda Healey
|genre=Literary Fiction 
|summary=A good tale, creepy family dynamics, contemporary context, appealing characters and some enjoyable humour combine in this belated-coming-of-age story. Recommended.
|rating=4 
|buy= Maybe
|borrow= Yes
|pages=400 
|publisher= Abacus
|date= February 2008
|isbn=978-0349119281 
|sort= Steep Approach to Garbadale
|cover=0349119287
|aznuk=0349119287
|aznus=0349119287
}}

It took me a while to realise that Iain Banks is, most of all, a teller of tales - I would call him a story-teller had this term not became a compliment-cum-invective usually reserved for the Jeffrey Archers and Dan Browns of the modern publishing world. This ability to tell stories - not to plot as much as to weave a yarn - combines with a penchant for creating appealing contexts for Banks' narratives to unfold in (this gets magnificently realised in the world building of his [[:Category:Iain M Banks|Iain M. Banks]] alter-ego) and populating them with memorable, larger than life but usually short of caricature, characters.

''The Steep Approach to Garbadale'' reads like an offspring of ''The Crow Road'' mated with ''The Business'' and, considering that I loved both of those novels, it's not surprising that I liked ''The Steep Approach to Garbadale'' very much.

Alban McGill (and via his mother, a member of the Wopuld clan) is summoned out of his self-imposed exile from the fold to attend a family meeting at their Highland pile of Garbadale. The Wopuld clan made their fortune on the board game ''Empire!'', now morphed into a best-seller computer game, and the Wopulds have to decide whether to sell out to an American corporation. As all the Wopulds prepare for the Extraordinary General Meeting, Alban is enlisted by the anti-sell-off party to try and persuade the undecided.

As he travels from a grotty council flat on a Perth scheme, when he's been crashing out on a mate's floor to the home of his eccentric maiden aunts in Glasgow to his parents' comfortable place in Richmond and back up North to the lochs and mountains of the Scottish Highlands, Alban recalls all the significant moments of his life and ponders the unanswered questions.

Why did his mother commit suicide when he was only a toddler? Was it a simple case of post-natal depression or is there more to it? What caused his grandmother to react with such a ferocity to the discovery of his teenage affair with his cousin Sophie? Is he truly over his infatuation with her? Should the Wopuld firm be sold off? Does he love his mathematician friend and lover Verushka?

The story is compelling, the numerous flashbacks work seamlessly and naturally and the resolution is rather satisfactory although, on some level, rather fuzzy. I liked that and didn't feel it was a cop-out, more a hint at what things tend to be in real life: all this intrigue, and in the end, it doesn't really matter.

The denouement of the 'family secret' sub-plot was both predictable and still rather shocking: it gave the characters involved an almost classically tragic air that I found genuinely affecting. Banks is very good indeed at describing convoluted and dark family dynamics that peter out to relative normalcy (after all, [[The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks|The Wasp Factory]] was a novel of just that), and he manages to do it without sounding in the least like an American psycholobabbler.

His characters are memorable, humane and likeable, self-aware but not particularly self-pitying, their humour wry but ultimately not cynical. They are also very much of their time, with their own political opinions and social concerns. I liked that too. I frequently find that unless the novel specifically deals with a particular event, many characters in modern fiction seem to live in an insular, self-centred world from which all the politics, all the current contexts, all the identifiable 'outside the plot' events have been removed. Most real people do have political opinions which influence their actions, surface in conversations and occupy their thoughts: without those, contemporary characters always seem weirdly unfinished and limited.

The occasional first-person sections from Al's low-life mate speaking in green-grocer's apostrophes and other misspellings were rather hilarious but didn't feel entirely exploitative. You could call them unnecessary but I liked the framing I provided, rather like a ned parody of a Greek chorus.

There were moments when the construction details of the whole looked a bit shaky, as when an instance of a first-person narration appears once inexplicably to turn into the usual third-person within a couple of paragraphs.

But ultimately, I simply enjoyed ''The Steep Approach to Garbadale'' and this is, what, in the final counts, matters most. Personally, 4½ stars, generally probably closer to 4, but still very much recommended.   You might also appreciate [[The Heat of the Sun by David Rain]], just because the writing is superb.

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