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Following the publication of Consider Phlebas in 1987, lain M. Banks would write 'gaudy wall-size canvasses of science/space fiction' (Banks 2013: x), while lain Banks would write mainstream, essentially realist, novels. But before the bifurcation of his career, The Wasp Factory (1984), Walking on Glass (1985) and The Bridge (1986) appeared under the form of the name lain Banks. For that reason, they have tended to be included among his mainstream fiction, an interpretation in which Banks was complicit: 'The Wasp Factory was my attempt at writing an ordinary conventional novel' (Sawyer 1990: 7).
Yet, these three novels are clearly far from ordinary, far from conventional. Indeed, when The Wasp Factory was rejected by Gollancz, the reader's report apparently described it as 'Quite well written, but far too strange ever to get published' (Nicholls 1993: 138). I would contend, therefore, that these three novels are most revealingly read as works of science fiction. This is partly because they pick up on devices and themes Banks had already explored in his as-yet unpublished science fiction. Primarily, however, it is because all three novels depend on layerings of reality and a sense of divided identity that have long been consistent elements in what might be termed the Scottish fantastic.
Scottish literature has characteristically centred on 'characters with damaged or distorted identities' (Middleton 1999: 7), from James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) up to Alasdair Gray's Lanark (1981). Even works that are not overtly fantastic often share this characteristic, as for instance in Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh (1993) and Morvern Caller by Alan Warner (1995). Such doubled or divided characters are also a feature of the work of the Scottish psychologist R.D. Laing, especially The Divided Self (1960). Though Laing's work was being called into question by the 1980s, he was very widely read throughout the 1960s and '70s and was a major influence on Scottish writers of the period (see, in particular, Miller 2005: Chapter Two). Banks is likely to have encountered Laing's work when studying psychology at university, or at least to have found his ideas disseminated throughout contemporary fiction. Laing's study of schizophrenia identified what he...