Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magnum Opus, 29 Aug 2006
Not just Iain Banks' biggest book, but his best in my opinion. This sprawling tale of dark family secrets and unrequited love is a modern classic and highlights Banks' talent for characterisation and believable cringeworthy situations. His heroes are never without their flaws and never lose their ability to strike a chord with the reader and such is the case with the sardonic, smart alec Prentice.
Iain Banks books are always easy to read but this one requires a tad more discipline than his others as it's not always immediately obvious which of the many characters is narrating each chapter. However, the book flows beautifully and builds to a magnificent and unexpected climax.
A great read for confirmed Banks fans and the unitiated alike who wish to indulge themselves in a great read. Hats off, Mr Banks.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
 
|
|
|
|
|
|
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the greatest British novels of the 1990s, 18 Sep 2000
Banks is a pretty honest fellow. As a writer he doesn't consciously set out to make his heros and heroines 'good', infact he certainly packs them with faults and foibles. A bit like real people in fact. Prentice is the same, and he's all the more enjoyable to listen to for it. "The Crow Road" is supremely enjoyable and, as has been said already, works in every way, delivering what you want out of it. When I first read it it spoke to me about the confusions of leaving your teenage years behind and the need to mature. Now, it's a rattling good murder mystery with some rather scathing politico dialogue thrown in. But there's more in the mix and you'd have to find it out for yourself. When Banks signed my battered old copy a couple of years back he smiled at the state of the cracked and dog-eared and well-thumbed book, then he wrote "Ha!" on the last page which, if you've read it, you'll understand. Love it.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
McHOAN RANGER, 7 Mar 2009
Taking the Crow Road is a vivid and startling Scottish expression meaning dying. How the expression originated I have never known, but I used to know the literal Crow Road very well. It is in Glasgow, it climbs northwards from Dumbarton Road, winds through Broomhill Cross and finishes in a flat and straight section, ending where it meets Great Western Road at Anniesland Cross. One distinctive feature of Banks's style - one that I find rather engaging - is his fascination with places and place-names, and in fact the metaphorical expression is hardly used here in the book, whereas the real Crow Road features by name far more than anything in the story calls for.
Six of the characters in the book take the Crow Road, five of them definitely not from natural causes and the sixth probably not. The book is not primarily about people dying, the deaths are all part of a kind of McHoan Saga centred on Prentice McHoan as a university student but also full of flashbacks to his childhood and even to episodes in the history of his extended family in which he takes no part. The first comment I should make on the novel is therefore that this tricky narrative technique is very well handled indeed. It all stays coherent, and the only time that I wondered whether the author had left a thread dangling was at the bit where Aunty Janice (a Crow Road dweller for no particular reason other than to mention the Crow Road) is looking red-eyed with Gav standing sheepishly in the background.
The other novel that I have read by plain Iain Banks (without the epenthetic M that he uses as a `science fiction' writer) is Whit. Like Whit, The Crow Road gradually turns into a detective story, only a better one. Again as in Whit, there is a plethora of incidental detail here, and again I think Banks does it better here. There is no sense of padding this time, and it adds colour to the narration. I suppose I can award myself a small pat on the back for realising that the man who can't pronounce his own name mentioned by the drunken chatterers at a party is Colin Powell, but that one was easy. One detail that might raise an attentive reader's eyebrows but which is incontrovertibly true is that there are fossilised tree-stumps millions of years old in Glasgow. I used to live only 5 minutes' walk from them, and you will find them at the western end of Whiteinch Victoria Park near Danes Drive. In particular the author's fascination with places is here again, and particularly with railways. What is it with Banks and railways? In Whit he hangs some of the narrative round the atmospheric remains of a cross-country line of transcendental pointlessness - and consequently of intense interest to railway antiquarians and fossil-hunters - but mistakenly has one end of it at Bridge of Allan instead of Stirling. I supposed that this was just a slip, but now I'm less sure. In the first place he concocts a railway that never was near Loch Fyne, and I have no idea why, for all it really adds to the story or the background. After that he does a very odd thing with it in Glasgow. Trains using this imaginary line would join the Helensburgh suburban tracks at Craigendoran and diverge from them after Westerton, with the local traffic continuing via Anniesland and the highland trains via Maryhill, meeting the Edinburgh main line at Cowlairs. For some reason Mr Banks has Prentice's train routed rightly through Maryhill and correctly trying to join the Edinburgh tracks, but then magics it back to Anniesland. The reason for doing this, I soberly believe, was to work in another mention of the Crow Road.
Interesting to the author and to me, that kind of detail, but of less certain interest to his readership generally, I suppose. By any general tests for quality as a novel and as writing, The Crow Road comes through with what they call flying colours. The characters all have real individuality, they are all very credible, and there are plenty of them. The narrative is full of life, as if the author enjoys what he does. There are 500 pages of it, but the atmosphere of Scotland is captured very attractively, whatever the various Scots get up to, notably alcoholic excesses with a variety of consequences. As with Whit, I was enjoying the book more as I went along, and the memory of the real Crow Road aroused my sentimentality enough to push its dark counterpart into the background.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Iain Banks
by Iain Banks
by Iain Banks
by Iain Banks
by Iain Banks
