‘Our close but prohibited union’: Sibling Incest, Class and National Identity in Iain Banks’s The Steep Approach to Garbadale

Abstract

The work of Iain Banks has been prominent in exploring the crossings of different kinds of borders: national, aesthetic and generic, ontological, gender and class to name but a few. Banks has also been part of a wider preoccupation in contemporary Scottish writing to do with inhabiting border zones, where the border ceases to be an idealised geometric line with almost no width or physical extension, and instead broadens to become a site that one can reside in, the ground against which the figure emerges. The clearest example of this in Banks’s work is probably The Bridge, in which the unnamed hero Alexander Lennox is injured in a car crash on the Forth Road Bridge and in his coma is transported as an amnesiac into the fantasy world of the Bridge, a huge structure which stretches across water in both directions as far as the eye can see and which is home for thousands of inhabitants. The Bridge, along with another Banks book set in contemporary Scotland The Crow Road will form the background to my analysis of Banks’s novel The Steep Approach to Garbadale. This essay will illuminate how The Steep Approach to Garbadale’s continuation of, and departure from, the border explorations and reflections on national identity of his earlier books is rendered through the crucial deployment of the motif of sibling incest in the novel.