Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram
Banks, Iain. Raw Spirit. London: Century, 2003. 368 pages.

Cutting up your passport to protest government policy is like cutting up your welfare cheque to protest poverty. Except, getting a replacement passport is a whole lot easier. But that's how Banks begins his quest for the perfect dram. He and wife, Ann, mail their destroyed passports to Downing Street, protesting the war on Iraq, but thus confining themselves to the country whose policies they so abhor. It's a thread that clumsily weaves its way through the first half of the book, then disappears until suddenly recalled when it comes time to sum up.

Banks' brilliance for evocative images shines through vividly as he recounts a train ride through Faslane and along Loch Long in the three paragraphs beginning middle of page 350. Would that such examples were more common, but there's a lot of hard slogging up to that point. Too bad, because that is where this book could have excelled – as a travelogue of Scotland. The central theme is the search for the perfect dram – and malt lovers, before they invest a lot of time reading, will want to know the search ends early on at Glenfiddich distillery- but that theme is really just a pretext for Banks to indulge his love of cars and his life as a successful writer. So much of the book is about cars, in fact, that a clever editor, with minor cut and paste could probably re-release a renamed Raw Spirit to car aficionados undetected by malt heads who read the original. Except some waggish car buff would probably suggest this could almost be a book about whisky.

Raw Spirit began as a publisher's idea. Get a well-known author to travel all over Scotland tasting malt whisky (it's much in vogue these days) and writing about his adventures. Banks accepted readily, much to the envy of his friends. To avoid post-tasting mishaps, a driver was to be employed, but Banks soon dispensed with that idea. He likes it too much behind the wheel himself. North to Orkney, west to Islay and Jura, through Speyside and many points in between, Banks visits most operating distilleries and samples wares from all. His tasting notes are rarely extensive, but echo the popular books about whisky. He loves the much-promoted notes that members of Malts-L would scoff at.

Banks is known for his ability to make complicated literary constructions work elegantly, but he appears to have taken a break from that discipline in this, his first published work of non-fiction. Though he amply demonstrates his skills at stringing words together, without a plot and not having characters to develop, the book has a tendency to lurch from thought to thought. Many of those thoughts do not involve whisky. For instance, he takes almost a page to debunk the idea that his first novel, The Wasp Factory, was autobiographical, calling on such noted authority as his mother to testify he did not have an abused or troubled childhood. We learn later, though, that he did, and still does enjoy blowing things up. To Banks, and he is the real topic of Raw Spirit, life is an adventure, but a sophomoric one.

Perhaps Banks' knowledge of whisky is not enough to fill 368 pages so must be supplemented with whatever he can find, or perhaps he is trying to construct a book that deliberately reflects the free flowing, rollicking good times he has drinking with his buddies. Core Banks fans and readers who've been known to say "Glenfiddich, now there's a whisky" may enjoy this aspect of Raw Spirit, but the malt connoisseur may wish to heed a signal that appears on page five when Banks sublimates the tastes of single malt to its being "a legal, exclusive, relatively expensive but very pleasant way of getting out of your head."

In short, Raw Spirit is a chronicle of Banks' adolescent idea of fun (jumping from balcony to balcony on tall buildings while drunk, rolling Porches, etc.) The book could be about whisky but it could just as easily be about cars or what it's like to be a successful writer who gets to do pretty much as he pleases whenever he pleases, but is a little short on ideas. The Scotland travelogue which dominates is quite good. Overall it's a workmanlike effort, but self-indulgent with no great inspiration. His interjections about the war on Iraq are tedious and very much dated already. If you must have it, wait for the paperback.

This review was first published at http://www.maltmadness.com/mm10.html#10-07
Eventually I hope to migrate all of these reviews to maltmaniacs.org