Two names have appeared in the media countless times recently: Iain Banks and Peter Capaldi.
The popular novelist Banks died in June having announced two months earlier that he was dying of gall bladder cancer. Peter Capaldi made the headlines for a rather different reason —in August he was revealed as the new star of BBC’s Doctor Who. Do you know what connects these two men?
I’ll tell you. Capaldi recorded the audio versions of many of Banks’s most famous novels and also appeared in BBC Scotland’s 1996 television drama based on Banks’s novel The Crow Road. The series was repeated on BBC Four over the summer and revealed something of Banks’s approach to religion. Banks was a self-proclaimed ‘evangelical atheist’ who described religious faith as ‘basically bananas’. His novels often explored and critiqued Christianity and The Crow Roadis no exception.
