Berlin getting in on the emergency bike lane trip. I had to go up to P’berg to pick up my laptop and found all of Kottbusser Damm on both sides hastily converted from double-parked cars to orange stripes of bike lane awaiting a quick once-over with the street sweeper. Dead cruisy to ride and realistically, like other cities in Europe using the pandemic as a chance to permanently improve things, this needs to stay. Personally, I’d have made it as wide as two lanes and consigned the centre one only to cars, ’cos we all know how much people love to double-park and as much as I love hoonage, private vehicle ownership has gotta go.
This is one of the better maps of the actual border of West Berlin, 1:50000 scale and traces a few parts I hadn’t seen so clearly before. Like West Berlin’s exclaves. The Berliner Mauerweg feels a lot smoother than the raggedness I saw on maps and experienced when biking, as though the act of memorialising shaved off the annoying bits, and in turn reified this version of a border. An area that shifted over time becomes a single line.
The messy bits are around Dreilinden, which leads into the exclave of Steinstücken; some of Potsdam — though the crossing of the Havel means there’s never a true way, unless I paddle myself over; Staaken and Seeburg east of Spandau; and the stretch from Wilhelmsruh up to Glienicke. Feels like time to ride the Mauerweg again.
Stasimuseum Berlin (Forschungs- und Gedenkstätte Normannenstraße): Karte des DDR-Bezirke Potsdam und des Westteils von Berlin
Stasimuseum Berlin (Forschungs- und Gedenkstätte Normannenstraße): Karte des DDR-Bezirke Potsdam und des Westteils von Berlin, Teltow (detail)
Stasimuseum Berlin (Forschungs- und Gedenkstätte Normannenstraße): Karte des DDR-Bezirke Potsdam und des Westteils von Berlin, Potsdam (detail)
Stasimuseum Berlin (Forschungs- und Gedenkstätte Normannenstraße): Karte des DDR-Bezirke Potsdam und des Westteils von Berlin, Staaken, Seeburg (detail)
Stasimuseum Berlin (Forschungs- und Gedenkstätte Normannenstraße): Karte des DDR-Bezirke Potsdam und des Westteils von Berlin, Glienicke (detail)
Stasimuseum Berlin (Forschungs- und Gedenkstätte Normannenstraße): Karte des DDR-Bezirke Potsdam und des Westteils von Berlin, Flugplatz Tempelhof (detail)
This turned out to be slightly more involved than anticipated. I should have known: Iain Banks is always in the details. Until starting this — and I’m still reading The Crow Road, for the maybe 3rd time — I hadn’t realised how fundamentally cars and vehicles form characters in his novels, much as landscape does, and if the landscape is up the Scottish end of town, the cars are solidly British, with rare excursions to various four-wheeled hoonage from across Europe.
I haven’t really decided how to do this, making it up as I go along, I thought to include the sentence where the car was named enough to make an educated guess at, which sometimes turned into multiple lines. Published in 1992, The Crow Road is set late–’89 to late–’90, at its most current period, with narratives in a number of periods back to just post–war. I’ve tried to match cars to the periods they were mentioned in, so no car is newer than end–’80s, and ‘old’ is 15–20 years minimum, relative to the scene’s time period. I discovered just how specific Banks was in choosing the ensemble of cars (2/3 of the way through and at least 27) when I was looking for an image of a Metro — Austin, MG, Rover, it got passed around — and found there was a period when it had no marque, it was just Metro. That’s the one he was talking about. And the Peugeot 209 isn’t, so either that’s an error, or this is Banks subtly trolling his Scottish alternate / coexisting realities again, like in Whit or The Business. In this reality, probably a 205.
And thank you to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and all the contributors, editors, photographers who enlightened and educated me, and provided the images for this banger collection of whips here.
That’s enough. Here are the cars of Iain Banks’ The Crow Road.
Instead I’d sold Fraud Siesta, my Car.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Ford Fiesta Mk1, 1976–1983
‘Lagonda.’
‘Sorry, Gran?’
‘The car; it’s a Lagona Rapide Saloon’
‘Yes,’ I said, smiling a little ruefully to myself. ‘Yes, I know’
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Lagonda Rapide Saloon, 1961–1964
The car came screaming up the crematorium drive, leaves swirling into the air behind. It was a green Rover, and had to be doing sixty.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Rover 216 SD3, 1985–1987
Everybody in the crowd outside the crematorium was watching the green 216 as it skidded to a stop, avoiding a head-on collision with the Urvill’s Bentley Eight by only a few centimetres.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Bentley Eight, 1989
The big Super Snipe growled into the car park, heeling as it turned and stopping with the passenger’s door opposite Kennith.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Humber Super Snipe Series IV, 1964
‘Anyway, couldn’t we take the Rover?’ Kenneth wasn’t keen on the Morgan; its stiff ride hurt his back and gave him a headache, and Fergus drove too fast in the ancient open-top. Maybe it was the sight of all that British Racing Green paint and the leather strap across the bonnet. The Rover, 3.5 though it was, seemed to calm Fergus a little.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Rover P5B 3.5, 1967–1973
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Morgan Plus 4. 1956
The upholstery of Fergus’s Rover was cleansed of the debris and stains associated with Verity’s birth and the car continued to serve the Urvill family for another five years or so until 1975, when it was traded in (for what Prentice thereafter would maintain was a scandalously small sum, considering that the thing ought to have been preserved as some sort of internationally-recognised shrine to Beauty) for an Aston Martin DB6.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Aston Martin DB6, Mk1, 1967
“We got into the Fiesta; she dumped the brolly in the back.”
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Ford Fiesta Mk2, 1983–1989
I kind of wished I’d sat behind Verity; I wouldn’t have seen so much of her – not even a hint of that slim, smooth face, frowning in concentration as she barrelled the big black Beemer towards the next corner – but I wouldn’t have been able to see the speedometer either.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — BMW 7 Series 735i E23, 1985
Verity wiggled her bottom, plonked it back down, calmly braked and shifted up to fifth, dawdling along behind the green Parceline truck while she waited for it to overtake an Esso tanker.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Parceline Truck
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Esso Tanker
Her battered, motley-panelled 2CV had looked out of place in Ascot Square, where I think that anything less than a two-year old Golf GTi, Peugeot 209 or Renault 5 was considered to be only just above banger status, even as a third car, let alone a second.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Citroën 2CV, 1973
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Volkswagen Golf GTi Mk2, 1987
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Peugeot 205 XR, 1986
‘I play games’, she told me.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ she nodded, licking her lips, ‘Like Name That Tail-Light.’
‘What?’ I laughed
‘True,’ she said. ‘See that car up ahead?’
I looked at the two red lights. ‘Yeah.’
‘See how high up the lights are, not too far apart?’
‘Yo.’
‘Renault 5’
‘No Kidding!’
‘Mm-hmm. One it’s overtaking?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Horizontally divided lights; that’s an old Cortina, mark 3.’
‘Good grief.’
‘Here’s a Beemer. New five series … I think, about to pass us; should have lights that slant in slightly at the bottom. ’
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Renault 5, Second generation, 1985
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Ford Cortina 1600 Mark III, 1972
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — BMW 5 Series 525i E34, 1989
Verity Walker, clad in a short black dress, was dancing sinuously on the roof of Uncle Fergus’ Range Rover.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Range Rover Classic, 1987
‘Ha!’ Prentice said, as the battered Cortina II drew to a stop just past them.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Ford Cortina 1300 Mark II, 1966
He helped Fergus drag the small corpse down the slope to the track, where the Land Rover was parked, and accepted a lift back to the road.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Land Rover Series II, 1958
An hour or so later I saw my mother’s green Metro, just about to turn out of the drive-way of Hamish and Tone’s house.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — (Austin) Metro, 1988
‘Na,’ he said. The Volvo estate accelerated down the straight through the forest towards Port Ann. ‘Though maggoty meat and people with one eye did come into it at one point.’
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Volvo 245DL Estate, 1977
Fiona brought the Rover to a halt behind a beaten-up Mini, standing on the gravel in front of the castle’s main entrance.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — British Leyland Mini Mark III, 1970
‘Isn’t that Fergus?’ he said, nodding.
‘Where?’
‘Racing green Jag, heading north.’
‘Is that what Ferg’s driving these days?’ Rory said, rising up in his seat a little to watch the car pass.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Jaguar XJS HE, 1989
I’ve always had this fantasy, that, after uncle Rory borrowed his flat-mate Andy’s motorbike and headed off into the sunset, he crashed somewhere, maybe coming down to Gallanach; came off the road and fell down some gully nobody’s looked into for the last ten years, or – rather more likely, I suppose – crashed into the water, and there’s a Suzuki 185 GT lying just under the waves of Lock Lomond, or Loch Long, or Loch Fyne, its rider somehow entangled in it, reduced by now to a skeleton in borrowed leathers, somewhere underwater, perhaps between here and Glasgow; and we all pass it every time we make the journey, maybe only a few tens of metres away from him, and very probably will never know.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Suzuki GT185, 1973–1978
One of my pals — graduated, employed, moving on to better things — sold me his old VW Golf, and I drove down to Lochgair most weekends, usually on a Thursday night as I didn’t have any classes on a Friday.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Volkswagen Golf Mk1, 1974–1983
We took Lewis and Verity’s new soft-top XR3i — roof down, heater up full — out into the grey-pink dawn and drove through Lochgilphead and then into Gallanach and just cruised about the town, waving at the people still walking about the place and shouting Happy New Year! one and all.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Ford Escort Mk4 XR3i Cabriolet, 1990
I parked the Golf behind a Bristol Brigand which sat half on the gravel and half on the grass.
The Cars of Iain Banks: The Crow Road — Bristol Type 603 S3 Brigand 1982–1994
“What if, Frances, what if we were to read all Iain Banks’ novels again—”
“Again? Like for the 6th time? All of them?”
“Nah, just the ones set on Earth—”
“So the ones without the M.?”
“Right, and we were to—”
“Except for Transition, ’cos that was an M. one in the States, but set on Earth. A bit. And a non-M. one everywhere else.”
“Yeah, but primarily the—”
“Also The State of the Art. That’s also an M. one, and Culture. And on Earth. What about Raw Spirit? And Poems?”
“W—”
“’Cos Raw Spirit is basically Complicity but real. With hooning and whisky; hooning for whisky. But no poetically deserved death.”
“Definitely Raw Spirit. Starting with The Crow Road—”
“We’re reading that now!”
“Y—”
“It’s not as good as The Steep Approach to Garbadale is it?”
“They all have cars though.”
“Iain was a hoon.”
“Exactly.”
“Until he wasn’t.”
“So what if we did a post of each novel, of just the cars!”
“Kinda like how we were going to do a post of each episode of Blake’s 7 of just the costumes?”
“…”
“Sounds great! Does this mean we’ll sit in front of our laptop and try to divine what each make and model of car is? For hours and hours?”
“Yeah!”
“This gonna be one of those ‘What happens if I … ?’ that turns into ‘Well, seemed like a good idea at the time’ things, innit?”
“As in ‘What happens if I blog all the cars of Iain Banks’ novels oh God this turned into so much work what have I gotten us into am I even having fun anymore why did I decide to do this again well it seemed like a good idea at the time?’”
“Yup, that.”
“Track record points to yes!”
“OMG count me in!”
“We’re so good together!”
“I know, right! When do we start?”
“We already have!”
I think I first heard about Charlie Martin on Jalopnik (also because of course), where she was interviewed by Elizabeth Werth about Hillclimbing, racing, and being a trans woman in motorsport. And in the comments someone said, “You should also do a story on Angelina King.” that is, Angie Mead King (who is still waiting for her story on Jalopnik). Much excellent hoonage, and I’m so, so very envious of what they drive and race.
