Acclaimed British-born novelist Iain Banks has created something magical in his new novel, “The Steep Approach to Garbadale,” a rare character in the form of Alban McGill, his self-loathing protagonist.
Alban may remind readers of a modern-day, gentile Portnoy, consumed by equal measures of lust and angst. He is a cauldron of conflicting desires. Alban, already 36, is single and spends most of his time lost in daydreams about his first illicit teenage love affair, with his first-cousin Sophie.
Long ago, Sophie distanced herself from Alban and has been living her own life. Alban hasn’t been so lucky, and has recently attempted to come to terms with his racing thoughts about her by leaving his obscenely rich family and the business they run and moving away to work on the land cutting down trees. It is almost as if he believes the physical distance from home coupled with backbreaking physical labor will break the hold she has on his imagination.
He is not having much luck. Vividly sensual memories of their trysts still haunt and dominate his mostly solitary erotic life.
Alban is consumed by thoughts about women, tormented and titillated by their bodies and other physical attributes.
But he is afraid of women, too. They threaten him with their inquisitiveness, their openness, their ability to touch places in him he has long ago tried to seal off. It’s not that Alban can’t or hasn’t made love to several women. His boyish good looks and smoldering intensity have snared quite a few of them. What Alban McGill can’t seem to do is find one woman to love, someone who might help him emerge from his own tightly wound bubble of neuroses.
His current girlfriend offers him several chances to grow up. A good-looking college math professor and mountain climber who lives by herself in a sparsely furnished apartment in Glasgow, she tries repeatedly to engage Alban in meaningful discussions about his past. He does tell her about his obsession with Sophie, his mother’s early suicide and the nightmares it still provokes, and he complains about his frustration with the realities of working in the family business.
But when she prods further, he pulls back, using humor and deception to shield his secret longings from both her and himself.
He’s often tongue-tied and frustrated. Banks aptly describes Alban’s verbal impotence with her: “He watches her face, side on, for a moment. He loves this woman, he realizes, but he doesn’t know how to tell her exactly how much without sounding either mealy-mouthed or just too cold. He has never been head-over-heels in love, not even with Sophie, in a sense. Sophie is so long ago, and what happened between them occurred at such a young, even formative age that she forms this awful, unstable, hopelessly compromised foundation for all the women he’s ever felt anything for since.”
Banks proves masterful at describing the tortured psychological landscape where so many men reside, men who feel forced to cling to a desperate sense of bravado while secretly hoping someone can break through the walls they have erected.
Alban does not seem to believe in the possibility of personal redemption and healing through intimate conversations with someone he loves. Instead, he becomes adept at diverting himself.
Banks’ novel occasionally loses its rhythm with its unconventional plot that zigzags in and out of present time, its sometimes strained dialogue and the author’s frequent digressive riffs on everything from politics to religion.
It’s almost as if the author, like Alban, becomes frightened by the intensity of his own story. But Banks always returns to us, and to Alban, and to the heart of Alban’s struggle: a young man trying to learn how to love.
ne Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
FICTION
The Steep Approach to Garbadale
Iain Banks
$25
