090102 Scotland

FOR all I know Iain Banks may lead a private life as suave and sophisticated as that of a character in a Noel Coward play. After our interview, he may go home to North Queensferry and don smoking jacket and cravat, but somehow I don’t think so. Bearded and bespectacled, he comes across as an eternal geography student with gingery whiskers. In plaid shirt and chinos, with bulging, black backpack worn strapped neatly onto both shoulders, he’s a real-ale-quaffing boy who likes his toys - fast cars and computers.

He is also a snaggle-toothed, sunny sort of chap, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. So he should be. Banks ranks - along with Irvine Welsh and Ian Rankin - as one of Scotland’s most successful writers, and his new novel, Dead Air, will do nothing to diminish his reputation. A thrilling read, it’s a dazzlingly clever, edgy, suspenseful book that starts on September 11, 2001. Set in a London reeking with the acrid whiff of paranoia in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the United States, it is also, admits Banks, the novel reinvented as rant.

The protagonist is one Ken Nott, who talks at a rate of knots because he’s a Jock who works as a shock jock on a London radio station. Everyone gets insulted in this book, from President Bush to those involved in high finance, from the monarchy to Scottish football. Nott’s rants - some of them are positively operatic arias - also touch on the troubles in the Middle East, Zionism, "the unending oppression of the Palestinian people by America’s 51st state", the scourge of Neo-Nazism, Holocaust denial and political correctness.

Someone, somewhere is bound to take offence at something in this contentious, brilliant book, which is presumably why Waterstone’s the booksellers nervously announced this week that they were cancelling Banks’s September 11 launch event at their flagship store in Edinburgh. As Banks pointed out after his promotional gig was dropped, Nott despises both terrorism and George Bush - "a sad, inadequate little man" - but could hardly be described as a supporter of Bin Laden. And the cancellation - his reading and signing session has now been picked up by bookselling rivals Ottakar’s - gave Banks the opportunity to rail against "typical corporate decisions... and the bean counters" who make them.

Nott is actually a post-leftie. "A bit of artistic licence there, I think," says Banks, when we meet over quantities of caffeine. "These guys tend to be right wing b*******, but I was determined that Ken would be like me - an unreconstructed leftie. I’m proud to be a pinko liberal. As I’ve got older and richer, I admit I’ve become a champagne socialist - sorry, make that vintage champagne socialist - but I’m certainly not apologising for it. I’m proud of all the rants in this book. I could have just gone down the pub and ranted because I do that regularly, but I became fascinated by the rant as art form."

His 19th novel, Dead Air - the title comes from the broadcasting term for silence - begins at a media party on a penthouse terrace in the East End on that fateful September day. Coked-up, Nott and a group of fellow guests start throwing stuff into the car park below, then the mobile phones begin ringing with news of the attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the TV is turned on. The story ends in a flooded, underground car park - Nott has an affair with a beautiful married woman, Celia, which leads to him becoming embroiled in London’s gangster underworld, hence the nervy climax.

"Everything in the book is broken or falling, a metaphor for the collapsing Twin Towers and that powerful image of destruction that’s with us all now," says Fife-born Banks. The book is also about the social aftershock in London - people’s fear of high buildings, their suspicion of foreigners, the heightened nature of political arguments and the risky business of stolen, steamy sexual encounters. Already there is huge interest in the film rights. The [Ewan] "McGregor boy" has been mentioned for the role of Ken, as has Dougray Scott. A friend in the film industry has told Banks it would cost £3m-£4m to film, so he’s waiting with interest to see who will buy the rights.

If he was going to write about the media - and Dead Air is a vicious attack on its often manic manipulations - Banks says September 11 seemed the only date on which to start. "Everyone remembers where they were on that day," he points out. He was driving around the B-roads of Scotland with his wife, Annie, in their open-top Porsche. A self-confessed "anorak", he was indulging in his hobby of inking in all the B roads they have motored along over the years on a map he keeps specifically for that purpose. One day in the distant future, he says, they will have travelled them all. "Sad, isn’t it?" he sighs.

So it was early evening before they heard about the atrocity. He recalls compulsively watching re-runs of the television footage. "It was one of those moments when you think you’ve slipped into an alternative reality. At first I thought it was some monstrous, Orson Welles-type spoof like that radio broadcast he made about the Martian invasion in The War of the Worlds."

Now 48, Banks is the author of such best-selling Gothic shockers as the million-selling The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road and Complicity (the latter two were remade for TV and film respectively), as well as eight science fiction books written in his Iain M Banks persona (the M is for Menzies, a family name). Science fiction is not regarded as a respectable genre, he agrees. Writing it has probably meant that he has been taken less seriously as a literary novelist. "At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it," he says good-naturedly.

Nevertheless, he’s that rare bird, a cult writer who is also bankable. And is Banks laughing all the way to the bank? "I wish," he replies. "I discovered only recently that I’m not actually a millionaire - which was most disappointing - because I don’t have £1m in disposable assets, but I am very comfortably off, thank you." (His last two-book deal was for £1m.) Cars are his biggest indulgence - he owns a BMW, the aforementioned Porsche, a Land Rover and a Mark II Jaguar 3.2, "a Morse-mobile because Annie insisted on it". He also loves motorbikes (he has a new red Honda VFR8-F1 that he’s desperate to run-in) and computers, although he no longer spends his days obsessively playing games in a special room in his parents’ home.

An only child, he bought his elderly parents the house next door and they used to police his addiction to gaming. He played Civilisation 3 for a month recently, then wiped the files and binned the CD. "If there had been a Civilisations Anonymous I would have had to join - Annie thinks I spend far too much time just staring at screens." He and Annie - "a glorious blonde" Anglo-German secretary he met in 1980 in a London law firm where he was working as a costings clerk - have been married since 1992.

They wed in Hawaii and are childless. A year into their marriage, Complicity came out. It tells the story of a dissolute, drug-taking, thirtysomething man who has a torrid, sadomasochistic affair with someone else’s wife. Is it autobiographical? Banks groans into his coffee. "No, I just wanted to write about someone who was compulsive in every way. I’m an addictive personality, compulsive, too, but not sexually. I have to say, though, I find writing sex scenes comes easily. But you know I don’t exactly get off on writing about sex in my books, although I do think that sex should be lots of fun." In fact, he confides, he wouldn’t mind winning the Bad Sex Award for Dead Air. "God knows, there’s a hell of a lot of sex in it."

Anyway, he adds, these days he is devoted to Annie, although he is adamant that he doesn’t deserve someone as nice as her. He has been faithful to her for more than a decade, but before they married she gave him two years off for "some seriously bad behaviour". In the wake of his new-found fame with The Wasp Factory, Banks ("an immature 34-year-old if ever there was one") lived the glamorous London literary life.

The dark coming-of-age tale about a murderous 16-year-old and his traumatised brother, The Wasp Factory ensured the Stirling University graduate became an overnight phenomenon in the publishing industry. His success also meant that he managed to pack half a dozen affairs into 12 months. "I discovered that you become more attractive as a man when you become more successful and, of course, publishing is full of beautiful, intelligent, witty women, more than most professions I would say. And, I’m afraid, I’ve always had an eye that’s tended to rove. I’ve also always had this thing about clever, funny women anyway, so I became a man of very easy virtue for a while. I still loved Annie dearly - and she eventually forgave me and took me back."

Nowadays, he just falls for his female characters - Banks always refers to women as "females" in conversation. In Dead Air’s Celia he has created a gorgeous fantasy woman. She has hair "the colour of heroin" (golden brown, for the uninitiated), caramel skin and a body that is "the most sensuous thing" Nott has ever seen in his life. "I have to say I do rather fancy Celia myself," says Banks, with a saucy wink. Despite his good behaviour nowadays, he remains very much a man’s man. He still likes to make occasional forays to London to see his pals and have a few bevvies. He researched Dead Air, which is also deliriously humorous despite the seriousness of its intent, in London by propping up various bars in clubs and pubs last autumn.

"I had a very good time - I forgot to do much in the way of research or taking notes, but that’s the way I work anyway. Also, I have lots of spies in the city who told me how spookily quiet it had become - all the rich people had fled to the safety of their country houses. But I do feel that the cultural landscape has dramatically changed since 9/11. I remember as I watched TV thinking, ‘This is as momentous as Pearl Harbor.’ Remember that books written after that were completely different from those that had been written before America entered the war, although I have to say I was quite glad I wasn’t writing anything last September."

Does Dead Air mark a mellowing in his writing? It is certainly much less nightmarishly violent than his previous mainstream novels, in which animals and people are often horrifically tortured. "Yes, it is less vicious, but that doesn’t mean that the next one might not be horribly twisted, nasty and dark," he promises. His wife never reads his books. "She’s a sensitive soul, so she doesn’t like my work. There are far too many nasty ideas in it. She prefers Good Housekeeping magazine or anything by JB Priestley."

So where do all those nasty concepts come from? "I have no idea," he replies. He has very boring dreams and rarely suffers from nightmares. His childhood in Fife was happy. His dad, Tom, now in his eighties, started off in the Navy as an able-bodied seaman, but worked his way up to become a first officer in the Admiralty. He met Banks’s mother, Jessie, on a Dunfermline ice rink where she was a professional skater and instructor.

"I had a great start in life. I was very spoilt and very loved, but I think being an only child I spent a lot of time amusing myself by making up stories.

"I wasn’t allowed to read in bed and I never had a torch and read under the bedclothes or anything - I honestly never thought of doing that. I wish I had since I suffered so badly from insomnia when I was growing up. I just made up stories and sang myself to sleep. And, yes, I was the sort of unpleasant little boy who pulled the wings off flies, but I also think I grew up with the thoroughly undeserved belief that everything revolves around me."

The Hungarian Lift Jet, his first unpublished novel, was full of sex and violence. He wrote it at 14. At university he studied literature, psychology and philosophy, but says he spent most of his time obsessively writing; then he did all sorts of jobs, ranging from ICI technician to bookings clerk. Now, he concedes, he’s a contented man - "overpaid and under-worked" - who lives in enjoyable "semi-retirement".

He plans to go on writing a book a year, alternating mainstream with science fiction set in his socialist utopia, The Culture. It takes him three months to write a book - although he reckons he wrote Dead Air in just six weeks. "I’m off now until next summer." He has only two remaining ambitions. A music buff, he wants to write a symphony - his Forth. He nudges me: "Geddit? It’ll tell the story of the Forth, so it’ll be my first but my Forth." And his other ambition? "Oh, did I forget to mention that? P***ing on Thatcher’s grave."

Dead Air by Iain Banks (Little, Brown, £16.99). Iain Banks will be reading from and signing copes of the book at Ottakar’s, 57 George Street, Edinburgh, September 11, 6.30pm; Waterstone’s, 153-157 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, September 12, 7pm; Steps Theatre, Dundee, October 2, 7pm