Iain Banks did not write men to be fixed. He wrote them to be exposed. That alone separates him from most literary fiction that claims to interrogate masculinity while quietly reinstalling it by the final chapter.
Banks understood that masculinity is not a set of traits. It is a pressure system. It produces behaviour long before it produces insight, and it rarely rewards reflection. His male characters are not confused boys on the way to enlightenment. They are already formed by violence, hierarchy, shame, and entitlement, and the damage is not reversible just because the prose is intelligent.
Look at The Wasp Factory and ignore the lazy shock discourse that still clings to it. What Banks is doing there is not transgression for its own sake. He is stripping away the comforting lie that masculinity becomes dangerous only when it is extreme. Frank Cauldhame is not an aberration. He is masculinity without social varnish, masculinity raised in isolation with its myths intact and its limits removed. The horror is not what Frank does. The horror is how coherent it all feels inside his head.
Banks refuses reassurance at every level. There is no guiding moral intelligence hovering above the narrative to signal that we are reading the wrong kind of man. The books trust the reader to sit inside male subjectivity without being rescued from it. That trust is rare, and many readers resent it because it removes their alibi.
Banks does not ask whether masculinity is toxic. He shows what happens when it is allowed to function normally.
In The Crow Road, masculinity is not monstrous but it is still damaging. Prentice McHoan is intelligent, ironic, self aware, and still steeped in a masculine culture of emotional deferral and narrative control. He tells the story because he can. He shapes events because he has been taught that meaning belongs to him. The novel does not punish him for this. It simply lets the imbalance stand.
This is where Banks outclasses a lot of contemporary writing that wants credit for sensitivity. He does not write men learning how to feel correctly. He writes men already fluent in the stories that justify their authority. The tension comes from what those stories cannot contain. Women, children, outsiders, and sometimes reality itself fall outside the frame, and the men barely notice.
Banks also refuses the genre move where masculinity is redeemed through competence. His men are often capable, sometimes brilliant, and still morally insufficient. Intelligence does not save them. Irony does not save them. Self knowledge does not save them. The books do not pretend otherwise.
Masculinity in Banks is not redeemed by awareness. Awareness just makes the damage harder to deny.
This is why his work still unsettles readers who want clarity. There is no moment where the novel reassures you that you are better than the men on the page. There is no exit ramp where masculinity is safely critiqued and then neutralised. Banks leaves it intact, functioning, persuasive, and destructive.
That refusal matters. Masculinity does not collapse under scrutiny. It adapts. Banks knew that. He wrote men who could explain themselves endlessly and still keep going exactly as before. No lessons learned. No moral closure. Just continuity.
Readers who want fiction to instruct them will always find Banks uncomfortable. He does not offer solutions. He does not flatter progress. He insists that masculinity is not a problem you solve. It is a system you survive, or don’t, and it does not care whether you understand it.
