Iain Banks, The Crow Road

Lucie Armitt (Lincoln University)
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Somehow concertinaed into an excellent four-part BBC television drama in 1996,

The Crow Road

remains a novel of encyclopaedic proportions. It is a narrative structured through competing cartographies (the mapping of space and time across Scotland, across epochs, and across class divides), but also competing chronotopes (the childhood world of the central protagonist, Prentice McHoan, versus that of his father's childhood world, versus the fictive present). Add to these complexities its exploration of the shared validity of competing narrative truths in the forms of rumour, history, riddles and dreams, and one gains an immediate sense of its panoramic concerns. Yet Banks succeeds in making all this cohere into a plot which weaves itself tightly around the family unit, its conflicts,…

828 words

Citation: Armitt, Lucie. "The Crow Road". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 31 July 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1177, accessed 29 March 2024.]

1177 The Crow Road 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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