Families in literature: the McHoans in The Crow Road by Iain Banks

This story of an eccentric Scottish family is outwardly more conventional than many Banks books, but 25 years on its central mystery remains compelling

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In the summer of 1991, I interviewed Iain Banks for an Edinburgh magazine. In the resulting article, I mentioned that his next book, which he had just finished writing, was to be called The Cruel Road. Oh dear. (I blame the cheap tape recorder I was using.) “To be honest,” he said of the heavy tome, “it was a bit of a slog. Glad it’s done.” He went on to explain that it was something of a departure for him; an ambitious but outwardly conventional Scottish family saga.

Much of the novel takes place in 1990, and follows Scottish student Prentice McHoan, and his large, and extremely eccentric, family. At the core of the story is McHoan’s attempt to discover what happened to his wayward uncle, Rory, who disappeared without trace years before. But the book departs from this main plot, jumping back at frequent intervals to explore the earlier lives of McHoan’s parents and aunts and uncles. It lends a strangely abstract quality to something supposedly conventional.

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