Inheritance, Identity, and Empire: A Critical Reading of The Steep Approach to Garbadale
Iain Banks’ 2007 novel The Steep Approach to Garbadale blends sharp political critique with personal reflection, family saga, and romantic tension, forming a complex meditation on identity, legacy, and power in a post-imperial Britain. Known for his ability to toggle between mainstream literary fiction and speculative work under the name Iain M. Banks, here Banks focuses squarely on the social and political landscape of contemporary Scotland and its uneasy relationship with the past, both personal and national.
At its core, The Steep Approach to Garbadale is a family novel. The Wopuld family—wealthy and powerful thanks to the worldwide success of their board game Empire!—is portrayed as both a dysfunctional unit and a microcosm of British imperial legacy. Banks uses the Wopulds’ reunion at their ancestral estate to stage a convergence of private memory and public history, probing how the past continues to shape present identity. The protagonist, Alban McGill, serves as the emotional and ideological lens of the novel, and it is through his reluctant involvement in the family’s affairs that Banks mounts his critique of capitalism, war, and the colonial hangover.
Alban is, in many ways, a quintessential Banksian hero: disillusioned, emotionally wounded, yet idealistic at heart. A former addict and mountaineer who has distanced himself from the Wopuld fortune, Alban is pulled back into the family circle when he is asked to help decide whether to sell the company to a powerful American corporation. This central conflict—the corporate takeover of a symbolically imperialist product—sets the stage for Banks’ broader concerns: globalization, cultural identity, and the commodification of history.
The game Empire! is not just a clever stand-in for Monopoly or Risk; it is a symbol of the British Empire itself, its rules and objectives mimicking colonial domination and resource exploitation. Banks uses this device to highlight how the past is often sanitized, repackaged, and profited from. The fact that the family is debating whether to sell the rights to an American tech giant is pointed: it signals not just a financial transaction, but a metaphorical passing of the imperial baton. The Wopulds’ moral vacillation over the sale mirrors Britain’s own ambivalence about its colonial legacy and its current position in the global order.
Alban’s opposition to the sale is as much about personal conviction as it is about political principle. He sees the company’s history, and the game itself, as tied to a form of cultural arrogance and violence that he cannot condone. His stance reflects Banks’ own political leanings: leftist, anti-imperialist, and deeply critical of neoliberal capitalism. Through Alban, Banks voices frustration with a society that continues to value wealth and tradition over justice and self-awareness.
The personal is never far from the political in The Steep Approach to Garbadale, and much of the novel’s emotional weight comes from Alban’s unresolved past—particularly his doomed romance with his cousin Sophie. Their relationship is more than just a narrative subplot; it is emblematic of the complex web of secrecy, shame, and repression that defines the Wopuld family. The taboo nature of their bond echoes the family’s overall dysfunction, its hidden histories, and the suppression of uncomfortable truths.
Banks uses family dynamics to mirror broader national themes. The Wopulds’ wealth has been built on conquest—albeit metaphorical conquest through a game—and their power has insulated them from moral reckoning. Secrets abound: affairs, suicides, betrayals. These private scandals parallel the public ones that Banks believes Britain has yet to fully confront. By exploring how a family maintains its myths and conceals its guilt, Banks suggests that nations do the same.
The setting of the novel reinforces this thematic interplay between landscape and memory. Garbadale, the Wopuld estate in the Scottish Highlands, is an evocative space: majestic, remote, steeped in history. Banks’ descriptions of the house and its grounds evoke both beauty and decay. It is a place of heritage and imprisonment, grandeur and suffocation. The “steep approach” of the title refers both literally to the winding road leading up to the house and metaphorically to the difficult path of confronting one’s past.
Garbadale is thus a psychological terrain as much as a physical one. For Alban, returning to the estate is an act of forced reckoning. His memories of childhood, of his mother’s mysterious death, and of his forbidden love for Sophie all converge there. The house is haunted not by ghosts but by histories—personal and imperial—that refuse to remain buried. This layering of memory and space is characteristic of Banks’ work, and it gives the novel its resonant, often melancholic tone.
Stylistically, The Steep Approach to Garbadale is one of Banks’ more accessible literary novels. It is less experimental than earlier works like The Bridge or Walking on Glass, but it retains his signature mix of humor, introspection, and simmering anger. The narrative shifts smoothly between present-day conversations and past episodes, with occasional digressions into politics, philosophy, and mountaineering. Banks’ prose is brisk and intelligent, his dialogue naturalistic and sharp. There is a sense of ease in the writing, but also a quiet urgency—a desire to say something meaningful about the state of things before it’s too late.
Critics have sometimes accused Banks of being too didactic, and it’s true that Garbadale doesn’t hide its politics. But the novel avoids becoming a polemic because of its emotional honesty. Alban’s disillusionment is never cynical; it is rooted in loss, longing, and a desire for authenticity. Even as Banks critiques systems of power, he never loses sight of the individual—their pain, their resilience, their need for connection. This is what gives the novel its human weight.
The love story between Alban and Sophie, though controversial in premise, is rendered with sensitivity. Banks avoids sensationalism, treating their bond as tragic rather than titillating. Their separation is portrayed as a kind of psychic wound that never fully heals. In this, Alban is a man stuck in time, unable to move forward because the past refuses to release him. His journey through the novel is not one of simple resolution but of complicated acceptance.
The question of whether the Wopulds will sell the company is ultimately less important than the moral and emotional consequences of their decision. In the end, Banks is less interested in plot twists than in moral clarity. The novel concludes with a sense of weary illumination: not all wounds can be healed, not all histories can be rewritten, but recognition and reckoning are still possible—and necessary.
In many ways, The Steep Approach to Garbadale functions as a coda to themes Banks had explored throughout his career. It is a novel about inheritance—not just of wealth and property, but of trauma, ideology, and guilt. It challenges readers to think about what legacies they carry, what histories they are complicit in, and what responsibilities come with remembering.
In its layered critique of empire, capitalism, and familial repression, Garbadale resonates well beyond its immediate setting. It speaks to a Scotland—and a Britain—still struggling to define itself in the shadow of empire and the flux of globalization. It reminds us that the personal is always entangled with the political, and that understanding one’s self means understanding the structures and stories that have shaped us.