Dead Air - Iain Banks
The title Dead Air comes from the description of London airspace in the immediate period after Sept 11, when flights were diverted from flying over London, an ominous and portentously unsettling time, during which Ken is not afraid to court controversy with his attacks on George W Bush. It also refers to a pause on the radio when there is no music and no DJ speaking, also a potentially panicky period of time – although, (and Banks references Mark and Lard’s, “Stop… Carry on!” here), a period which a good DJ who is willing to take risks can use to his advantage.
Taking risks is a philosophy he applies to Ken’s love-life as well, having a dangerous affair with Celia, the wife of a prominent underworld criminal, (who has a Double vie de Véronique theory of having a parallel self). When he is the victim of an attempted drugging and kidnapping, he begins to worry about his personal safety. But there could be any number of people he has upset recently who could be after him.
This seems to be the underpinning image the book wishes to evoke – Ken McNutt is someone who is willing to take risks during a period when everyone else would be unsettled. The book successfully takes up this theme in the first chapter and attempts to let the menace and potential dangers overshadow what follows. The book’s cover effectively conveys the same impression. Unfortunately what follows is somewhat of an anti-climax, the real threat turns out to be that after shagging a gangster’s wife, Ken leaves a compromising message on her answering machine and then has to risk his neck breaking into the gangster’s house to erase it. You just know what is going to happen – you are just waiting for the moment he has to sneeze when he is hiding in the wardrobe, and sure enough… Still, despite the lack of imagination and over-reliance of the f-word to convey panic, it does still set the heart-rate pounding.
Despite courting controversy, Ken is really a woolly liberal at heart (he describes himself as a “fucking militant liberal”) and trots out all the arguments you’ve heard many times before. Certainly you’d be hard pushed to disagree with his points, but you’ve heard them all before. One of his friends, Craig, accuses him of regurgitating the drivel they talk about for his radio show, yet this is exactly what Banks is doing, regurgitating in print the same pointless conversations we’ve all had in pubs and at dinner parties, needlessly padding out the novel with his own (the author’s?) political worldview.
He tackles all the major issues in the current world picture, from the marches at Dumcree to Palestine, from 9/11 to the rise of right-wing extremism in mainstream politics. Attacking an extreme right-wing Holocaust denier on a TV programme is admirable, but ultimately futile and only done to make a superficial point. But despite the coverage of big topics, nothing here carries the weight of the deeper philosophical themes of mortality and immortality examined so brilliantly in his Culture universe science-fiction book Look to Windward. And while the prose there was beautifully lyrical and the novel tightly structured, here the prose is functional and unshowy.
The structure of his novels is usually one of Banks’ strong points, but in the first half of Dead Air we jump back and forth within a narrow timeline – between 2000 and 2001, so we could be weeks behind one moment and a week or two ahead the next, and without any major events in between, it isn’t always clear which time-frame we are in from one scene to the next. He uses a analogy of ‘stupid footballers’ and how, when they take to long to thing about what they are doing, they fluff it. Ironically, after the ‘churned-out on a conveyor belt’ masterpiece of Look to Windward, it’s looking like Banks could be suffering from the same problem after his recent sabbatical.
All this real-world current affairs also risks dating the novel horribly even before it is released. Banks does ‘shopping and fucking’? Name dropping and product placements abound, (though not quite as horribly tastelessly as in The Business) referencing Oakleys, DKNY, WKD, Fabien Bartez, Moby, and as Ken is a DJ, he manages to chuck The Hives, The White Stripes and The Strokes all in the one back-to-back session for some hip credibility – not bad for commercial radio! ll this risks making this book as contemporary as last month’s Guardian. But maybe that is what the author wants, fixing the time of the novel in a specific cultural time capsule. This would be fine if there was some more substance in the novel but it just seems to be as superficial as The Business, displaying what appears to be the frustrated ambition of an author who wants to be leader writer for the Guardian or the Independent.
In reality it’s all so much random soundbites, politics-lite, Sunday supplement columnist material. Interestingly, Amy - the one person who seems clued into reality and just how superficial his views and behaviour are and how much of a pawn of the system he really is - tells him so and turns out to be a disappointing fuck when he get her in bed. A bit like Dead Air. Promises much but turns out disappointing.
Banks is a talented and imaginative writer who is capable of delivering better and more serious books than this, and making them entertaining as well (A Song of Stone excepted). The potential is there in the book to explore the post-millennial tension of our age, and a writer like Banks is more than capable of doing this. Instead, what we have with Dead Air is an enjoyable farce, which is entertaining and disposable in a Chris Moyles Radio Show kind of way, but nothing much else. Roll on the next Iain M Banks.
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