Dead Air

Ken Nott is a shock-jock working on a commercial radio station in London. Ken thrives on controversy and this makes his show a big success. Alongside his talent for
upsetting people for a living, Ken is a heavy drinking serial womaniser, and basically an out-and-out bastard. Then Ken meets Celia, the beautiful wife of one of London's most dangerous gangsters and embarks on an affair. Things do not go well and Ken ends up in a spot of bother.
This was a re-read of an old favourite of mine. It's certainly not Banks best novel (and I prefer his SF offering by a very wide margin), but this is Banks on tremendous ranting and opinionated form. Ken is a horrible man and his radio rants are at face value abhorrent. However, somehow Banks makes show more him almost loveable and below the laddish surface there are some insightful political arguments in the rants. The last quarter, which deals with the consequence of Ken making a big mistake with Celia's husband is full of suspense but is also very funny. I'm glad I gave it another read. show less

Just when you thought Iain Banks' non-science fiction novels were getting into something of a rut - not entirely true, but easy to get that impression if you don't read them in order of publication - he came up, in 2003, with this story about an expat Scot in London in 2001 who is a highly opinionated shock jock (literally!) on a London commercial radio station. His days are full of witty - if obscene - repartee, political rants of a Leftist nature, hedonism and glancing contact with the world of celebrity. Even the attacks on the Twin Towers barely shake his world, though they open up new avenues of controversy and argument for his daytime radio phone-in show. But at an exceedingly posh party given by the owner of the radio station, he show more meets the wife of a notorious London mobster and things start down a road that shows all the signs of ending really, REALLY badly.

Everything ends happily, though. Some see the happy ending as a tacked-on getout, and it's easy to see why. But like most of Banks' central characters (I nearly wrote 'heroes' there, but there's little heroic about Ken Nott, the character in question), there is a transformation, a dark night of the soul and an emergence into daylight of sorts.

The main thing I took away from the novel was how enjoyably funny I found it (which makes the dark turn as we descend into Ken Nott's existential crisis all the darker). Banks' writing always showed off his Scots humour, but this was regularly laugh-out-loud funny. Moreover, I visualised Ken Nott as Banks himself, which perhaps made the book much more immediate to me. The politics is certainly genuine Banks, as is the inventiveness (Nott's plan to deflate a Holocaust denier on live tv has an elegant simplicity amidst the hoisting of petards). And of course, I remember the times, and although I didn't move in those circles, I knew some who did and heard the tales.

Collector's lament: the UK Little, Brown hardback first edition saw a completely new cover design for Banks' novels. It's a nice cover, but it's not the striking alternating white-on-black/black-on-white design, with illustrations by Peter Brown, of Banks' mainstream works up until then. This means that my collection of Banks first editions is not in any way uniform from 2003 onwards. This irritates me in ways that only a collector will understand. show less

"Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls being polite."

'Dead Air' is a cross between 'The Crow Road' and 'Complicity' and sees Iain Banks returning to familiar ground with his characters and plot.

Glaswegian Ken Nott is a devoutly left-wing contrarian shock jock working for Capital Live!, a London commercial radio station where he rants about everything from religion to gun control to congestion, taking pleasure in belittling his listeners and receiving death threats. The story opens in September 2001 when Ken is attending a party in London just as the Twin Towers are attacked. The story opens with a bang and basically accelerates through one man's political obsessions dropping Ken in some show more interesting situations involving death threats, women, drugs and live television along the way.

Ken isn't a particularly likeable character, he is a opinionated, drug-taking, self-centred lothario skipping from one sexual partner to another with little thought for the turmoil he leaves in his wake. The main story revolves around Ken’s affair with a gangland boss's wife. When Ken leaves an ill-advised telephone message on her home's answering machine his life starts to spiral out of control.

To tell you the truth at the end of this novel I wasn’t sure what it was actually about. OK, you see Ken bound up in some dodgy predicaments of his own making, from the deadly serious to the hilarious, but you don’t get a sense of a whole. It is well written, clever and funny with great characters and set scenes that made me laugh, I’m just not sure if it actually had a plot. We are simply dropped in to the middle of Ken’s life, we watch a few set scenes unfold that made me laugh, then it is over and everything carries on.

Don’t get me wrong I'm a big fan off the author's works even if they aren't for the morally squeamish and perhaps worryingly I found myself agreeing with many of Nott's rants but I also found it a bit shallow and vacuous. It's a bit like a McDonald's burger, it satisfies you for a short period of time but you are soon left wanting something more substantial. show less

Laddish account of urban hedonism punctuated with progressive riffs against the ugly signs of our times. Banks made me laugh, but appeared to be going in opposite directions. One could imagine the subsequent torque generated would be exciting. It wasn't, at least not in such an artiistic arc. Banks plays a comic suspense effect pedal adroitly over the last 70 pages. I was impressed with that but was baffled per the novel as a whole.

I'd afford the novel another .5 for the dialogue which crackles.

Brilliant characterisation, great social satire and ranting that Christopher Brookmyre would be proud of. Gripping, even though not a lot really actually happens. Has a couple of pant-wettingly tense scenes, particularly near the end, which leave you feeling like you were really there.

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This is the story of Ken Nott, a Scot who hosts a popular London radio show. The political disasters of late 2001 are mirrored in his personal life, as his dangerous affair with a gangster's wife drags him into the underworld. Nott's obsession with truth at a professional level (there is a rather peculiar show-down with a Holocaust denier) is contrasted with his difficulties with honesty in his sex life. Banks has a great ear for dialogue and for the different demotics of London. And the climactic chapters, where Nott tries and fails to avoid the wrath of his lover's husband, are vividly related. Very enjoyable.

This is the book to read when beginning to tire of Iain Banks's non-scifi formula. It starts out seeming, well, pretty formulaic, but as the plot develops it becomes clear that the author realised he was in danger of falling into that sort of rut, and decided to play with the expectations that he'd set up. The result is one of his lighter and more laugh-out-loud funny novels, even though at the same time it has some pretty pointed things to say about a thoroughly regrettable period of recent history, and in hindsight about the things that white men get away with. My one criticism is that at times the protagonist's political rants--which were clearly Banks speaking through a character--get self-indulgently long. Even agreeing with him I show more found myself wanting him to shut up and move the story on at times.

This book also captures the zeitgeist of 2001/02 London really beautifully - a time I remember particularly vividly because it was the last couple of years of me living in London's orbit.

I would recommend not reading this one until you've read a few of his others. It stands alone, but some of the surprises would have had less impact if I'd read it with a less of an expectation of what Iain Banks did. show less