A rich family’s secrets revealed

“The Steep Approach to Garbadale” is Scottish writer Iain Banks’ first novel for the San Francisco-based MacAdam Cage, and the match of iconoclastic author with his cult audience and an energetic young publishing house is a good one. This isn’t Banks’ tidiest or best novel, but it is a worthwhile extravaganza: at once a dark novel-of-inheritance in the manner of Victorian-era novelist Anthony Trollope and a palimpsest of Banks’ writings so far.

There are the same tangled family relationships found in “The Crow Road”; the unapproachable love object as in “Walking on Glass”; the occasional use of Scottish dialect a la “The Bridge”; touches of the political fury in “Dead Air”; the dreadful family secrets from just about every novel; and lastly, a title resembling the fantastically named ships in the science fiction space operas he writes as Iain M. Banks. A palimpsest, yes, but these are only superficial echoes, and if Banks’ slant on the world is familiar to some, this tale is fresh enough to please.

Banks has an eye for designers and labels, and his bead on Western pop culture -- “He’s always . . . found this idea that girls come sort of factory sealed kind of weird” -- reminds one of William Gibson. Both writers have an easy knowledge of how the right accessory -- and the owner’s relationship to it -- can open up a character. A central character, Sophie Wopuld, is dated as much by her Frankie Goes to Hollywood T-shirts and the color of her hair as by her career or her way of speaking.

Like his cousin Sophie, Alban McGill is a Wopuld. Their family fortunes, based on 125 years of the board game Empire!, have mirrored that of the British empire. As Britain’s declined and U.S. fortunes rose, the family business looked to America for much-needed cash. Six years earlier, the U.S. conglomerate, Spraint Corp., bought 25% of the Wopuld Group. Now Spraint, planning to launch a computer-gaming consul with an updated Empire! built in, wants the remaining 75%. The family calls an extraordinary general meeting at Garbadale during the celebration of the family matriarch’s 80th birthday to decide on a response to the bid.

Alban’s return to the family fold is in question. He is a Wopuld on his mother’s side, but his mother committed suicide at the estate when he was 2. Raised by his father and stepmother, Alban has never quite fit in. At 35, he had already quit Wopuld Group and more recently was injured on his job of choice, forester. Back at Garbadale, Alban surprises himself by becoming involved in the faction trying to persuade the rest of the Wopulds not to sell out.

The novel jumps back and forward in Alban’s life, but the writing pulls the reader through scene shifts by tone alone. The voice of Alban as a quiet, horny and hopeful 14-year-old is quite different from that of the tired, uninspired 35-year-old.

How the one became the other is explained by requited, then unrequited, love. This and other family secrets, which are hinted at but await the family meeting for full exposure, form the skeleton on which Banks hangs his novel. The flesh of it -- bloody, easily hurt -- is Alban’s obsession with Sophie. Their almost bruisingly sweet affair as teenagers has the autumnal tang of both forbidden and almost-turned fruit.

Even when they are disastrously caught in flagrante delicto, Alban finds he can’t let go. Twenty years on, he knows he has embarrassed himself, Sophie and the family multiple times. But his inability to act on this knowledge is his tragic flaw. The author seems to be saying that like America’s war in Iraq -- about which Alban vents his spleen -- his protagonist cannot escape the quagmire of his own desires.

“And are you over it?” asks his grandmother. He reassures her that he’s over his crush, but thinks to himself, “I’ll be fine when I can get back in touch with Sophie, and even more fine when we’re together again. . . . He is. . . not going to deny Sophie, deny his love for her, or say anything that is actually a lie.”

The book is full of many characters, some barely more than sketches. The Trollopian breadth of this type of novel is best supported with an early introduction to the full cast of characters. Instead we get a somewhat disjointed introduction to Alban’s housemates who, though friendly and fun, barely figure in the story.

The names Banks gives his characters are spot on and he can’t resist the occasional piece of almost painful wordplay understandable mainly to those familiar with a Scottish brogue. But “The Steep Approach” is no exegesis on the difficulties of life in modern Scotland. Instead it is a pointedly humorous and satisfying social novel of a man’s delayed and difficult journey into adulthood.

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Gavin J. Grant is a co-editor of the annual anthology “The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.”