Ken Nott is a 35-year-old talk-show host - or shock-jock to use modern parlance - working for Capital Live radio in London. He is Scottish by birth, his Celtic temper liable to break out at a moment's notice. Once married to nice nurse Judith, his "current squeeze" is off-the-wall publicist Jo: "Drowned World-era Madonna-ish, with black tights, a short tartan skirt and an old leather jacket over an artfully ripped T-shirt".
However, he is also in a relationship with Celia from Martinique, who just happens to be married to London crime boss John Merrial. Add in the fact that, after drug and drink crazed binges, he is apt to fornicate with whoever is available; that he has had a one-night-stand with his best friend's wife; that he is being hunted by heavies working for a city type against whom he is to bear witness in a traffic accident; that he is being sued by a right wing fascist whom he assaulted on a television show; and it is easy to see that our hero, to put it mildly, leads a rather eventful life.
All of this is played out against a scenario of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, a cataclysmic event meant to universalise the microcosmic chaos of urban life as it is lived by the new "celebrities" of this modern era. Unfortunately the tatty nature of such "celebrity" fame leads to a corresponding crassness in those who record it, the result being a salivating preoccupation with content, to the detriment of an analogous critical analysis.
Here, mostly because of an outrageous happy ending, we are obviously being urged to admire Nott's manic lifestyle, his creator putting him forward as some kind of modern-day Don Quixote, tilting at the windmills of the spurious and the profane, while still being intrinsically involved. Unfortunately, I'm of the old-fashioned "shock-jock" mentality that finds this bad language-strewn, anything-goes, with-it way of life - and literary recording of it - a sin against good taste and the age-old verities of good and evil.
Having said all that, I must also record Banks's dexterity with words, the colossal pace of his narrative, and the inventive resources of his imagination. Would that these qualities were used to chronicle a more heroic epic, at a time when we badly need heroes.
Dead Air. By Iain Banks. Little, Brown. 408 pp. £10.99 sterling
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic