The Crow Road by Iain Banks

This book leads you in - it won’t grab you. You’ll be drawn in and given the perspective of Prentice, a young man who is trying to decide who he is, and what form his relationships will hold. This means he’s not an immediately likeable person. In fact, there are parts where you think he’s selfish, holds immature grudges and not fully aware of all his feelings. But this makes him real, like any other young person his age.

The Crow Road was the book that the cool kids were reading back in the 90s. I however, was studying and making my way through text books, trying to get an education. This meant, I never really took in any of Banks work. That is, until last year, when I read two of his sci-fi novels, The Player of Games and Consider Phlebas. They were both surprisingly consumable and a pleasant distraction from ordinary fiction. Then, I decided to read The Crow Road.

The plot doesn’t move at pace, but instead flows from one timeline to another. Obviously, you as a reader, have to piece them together, but Banks does a good job of helping you manage that, with appropriate references. The characters are held together in a way whereby they mean something to each other, but aren’t always getting on. There is conflict, and you can see the characters that want to help each other, but the suffering characters don’t always sense this.