Dead Air

Iain Banks

Iain Banks' Dead Air is one of those novels whose first chapter is so irritating you're uninclined to go any further. It kicks off with a wedding reception in a posh London penthouse apartment and at the party you're introduced to narrator Ken Nott. Supposedly Ken is a left-wing radio talkshow shock jock. None of the characters at the party are at all attractive, or even interesting, and all of them seem to have media type jobs - those kinds of jobs that allow characters to roam freely through novels and films without doing an awful lot of work while seeming to be more than decently well off. Also irritating, at least it is to me, is an author who likes to scatter drugs around in the first few pages. With terrific artificial nonchalance. As if to say, well, we're all doing drugs nowadays aren't we? It's as commonplace as going to the toilet. Well, if it's truly as much a part of the scenery as going for a slash, why for chrissakes does every snort, sniff and puff need to be documented? Still more irritating are the closing few pages of our first chapter which has the narrator becoming bored and starting to lob fruit, food, drink and eventually furniture over the balcony and onto the tarmac below. We're supposed to want to spend the next 440 pages with this crowd?

But after this unpromising start, Dear Air turns into really rather a good read. Gradually Ken evolves into something a lot more interesting and as the book goes on more likeable characters appear. Ken's radio rants are entertaining and anarchic and refreshingly free of predictable left-wingery. And the parties get better. At one of the parties, this time thrown by Ken's radio station owning boss - a sort of cross between Richard Branson and the Marquess of Bath - Ken meets and begins an affair with the wife of London's chief crimelord. Shagging a gangster's lady is clearly a dangerous hobby and much of the rest of the book is taken up with the business of keeping Ken's kneecaps intact. While not forgetting his day job of baiting holocaust-deniers.

It's entertaining stuff. Perhaps it doesn't sparkle and sizzle like The Wasp Factory but it's certainly more than just an intriguing cover.