Product Description

The war is ending, perhaps ended. For the castle and its occupants the troubles are just beginning. Armed gangs roam a lawless land where each farm and house supports a column of dark smoke. Taking to the roads with the other refugees, anonymous in their raggedness, seems safer than remaining in the ancient keep. However, the lieutenant of an outlaw band has other ideas and the castle becomes the focus for a dangerous game of desire, deceit and death. Iain Bank's masterly novel reveals his unique ability to combine gripping narrative with a relentlessly voyaging imagination. The narrative technique and sheer brio of A SONG OF STONE reveal a great novelist at the height of his powers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #273431 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 280 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Iain M. Banks paints a grim picture of a European nation after a bloody battle. Armed forces roam the lawless land where dark columns of smoke rise up from the surrounding farms and houses. For a young lord and lady, however, the trouble is only starting.

The couple are being kept captive in their home--a castle--by a sadistic female lieutenant from an outlaw band of guerillas. They are pawns in her dangerous game of desire, deceit, and death. The physical, sexual and political tensions that ensue catapult the narrative from war story to universal morality tale.

INDEPENDENT
* "His satire is exquisitely poised, his storytelling gripping."

GUARDIAN
"Entertaining...comically inspired."

Customer Reviews

An inconsistent and largely infuriating experiment in language...
The setting is an ancient castle segregated and cast adrift amidst a hostile, post-apocalyptic landscape. Our characters represent the final pocket of humanity from disparate backgrounds and viewpoints, with the author choosing to look specifically at the emotional power play between three incongruent archetypes whilst, simultaneously, wrapping their plight in themes such as trust, loyalty, honesty, possession and betrayal. The use of language is exasperating throughout, with the writer using arcane plotting, evocative descriptions, poetic soliloquies, prose-like dialog, jaw-dropping phrasing and more than enough alliteration, to further sketch out the world in which these characters co-exist (whilst also developing the sense of emotional connection and understanding between our three leads). So, with all these noble and intelligently creative characteristics on display, why does The Song of Stone remain one of Banks' most infuriating and inconsistent works?

For me, the book never really got anywhere. That would be it's biggest problem. I admire Banks' desire to push the limits of what modern literature can achiever through its use of language, sentence construction and dialog that could easily be classed as poetry, but really, the narrative of this book is so slight that the whole thing could probably be dubbed style over substance. There were, of course, flashes of genius, with the book alluding to the strange relationship between the couple that own the castle and the band of marauding mercenaries that take it over... as well as some interesting ideas about loyalty and possession, in this case, both the possession of objects and the personal possession of other people. There were also a number of scenes in which Banks was able to get the drama to a dizzying degree, specifically during the huge militant banquet and our protagonist's expulsion from his own home, not least, the drive to the woods and that whole subjective final chapter. But for me, this was too little too late. The whole book seems like a slow trek up a steep hill, with Banks playing far too many games for his own enjoyment and allowing plot elements that could have metamorphosed into staggering twists and turns (ala, The Crow Road, Complicity, etc) instead become mere clichés.

There were times when the whole thing reminded me a little of Banks' better, earlier work, The Bridge, with the notion of Ian Banks venturing into the territory of Iain M. Banks, with elements of social metaphor and allusions to existentialism allowed to permeate his usual constructs of quirky characters, shocking violence and all manner of past immorality. But this too fell flat, and the whole thing took turns into routine thriller territory and even worse, melodrama. It's a crying shame really, with the use of language as previously mentioned featuring amongst the very best examples of showboating literary spectacle of the last decade. It's just a pity that the plot, characters and sub-textual emotional resonance didn't really come together until the latter half of the book. There's still enough going for it to warrant a three star rating, but this is hardly a book to clamour over. Perhaps it would make good reading fodder for those all to familiar rainy days, when there's really nothing better to do.

A Song of Stone
Firstly, I will warn that this review probably contains spoilers, though the novel doesn't hinge so much on the events that take place but rather on the perceptions of the narrator.

When beginning to read this novel I was put off by the tense of the writing; "I smell your scent, the soap from your last bath this morning in the castle, ...", however, after a couple of chapters it became clearer as to the context of this writing style. The narrator is talking to his lover in, from what I can gather, an extended piece of internal dialogue either as events happened or all recalled in the night before his death. So what I at first judged as an inept writing style, I soon found quite ingenious.

The narrator seems movingly lethargic and resigned to the cruelty of fate that piles up upon him. This is analogous to the detatched and cold way that his lover - the naratee of this internal dialogue - treats him, shown from events as they happen and from memories from the past. Despite some of the horrible things that occur, the most painful parts of the narrative for me were those of the narrator's lover's indifference to him and callousness at certain points. The visceral reality for the narrator in all respects is given with the unedited realism of a person's own deep thoughts.

At one point in the narrative, the direction of the narrator's experience takes a sudden and horrible change, though his impartment of these experiences are given in the same non-self-pitying and resigned way to his beloved but tragically detatched and seeminly indifferent lover. His lack of any change in his tone despite the great change in the gravity of his situation implies the arbitrariness that the narrator seems to view life with, which may be linked to the fact that his partner and lover is his sister; and a lover who seems not to reciprocate the deep feeling he has but is with him none-the-less, (perhaps she is mentally handicapped in some way; this is not touched upon in the narrative but there are certain hints at this, such as the fact that she never says a word).

Tragedy escalates as the narrator initially escapes from being treated as human to being suddenly reduced to the status of an object being killed for fun, but straight after finds his lover betraying him. He is tolerant however and acceptant of her betrayal - with a woman - but even this isn't enough and bad luck leads to further tragedy. There is some sense of justice soon after as a main perpetrator of much of the misfortune of the narrator is put to a gory fate, but the final tragedies just escalate on top of this, and however the narrator plays them down in his fatalistic acceptance of events, the reader cannot help but be moved by the visceral cruelty and tragedy.

I found this novel to be a moving and callous narrative of tragedy and painful realism, far more painful than even this far from perfect and infallable narrator deserves.

Let's just say this is not a good introduction to Iain Banks
I love a lot of Iain Banks books but I can't say I enjoyed this book because it's very heavy going.

I've stuck with him since I picked up The Wasp Factory in the library as a teenager - at a time when it was the only book he'd written - and I was so blown away by it that I got my girlfriend to read it right after me. And of course she loved it, too.

My girlfriend had become my wife by the time A Song of Stone was published and she read it and said she didn't think much to it, so I guess that put me off and I didn't pick it up and until eight or nine years later. I'm glad I gave it a chance, eventually.

The author clearly took the decision to write in the very verbose voice of detached, decadent aristocrat Abel using the first and second person present tense throughout and as a result sometimes it takes half a page for him to say almost nothing. I freely admit that I might just not be sufficiently literary-minded to appreciate the meticulous and expansive prose. Instead, I found myself occasionally having to re-read passages where my mind had wandered and I suddenly realised I had stopped paying attention to what I was reading and had started thinking about something else entirely.

It's more of a novella than a novel and the plot can be summed up in a sentence. The lord and lady of a castle are attempting to flee to safer environs in a time of war when they run into a band of maverick soldiers - led by a formidable young female lieutenant - who take them back to their castle and hold them prisoner there until the castle and its limited resources have exhausted their value and it is time to move on.

There are a number of things about the novel that make it unconventional and as such, to me, in my conservative little world, fairly unsatisfying. The story doesn't have a lot of closure, the history of the characters is unclear, and the wider scenario of society and politics is deliberately ill-defined. In theory that means it's a feast for the imagination, leaving so much for the reader to embellish, but in practice it just means we don't really understand the characters' motivations. We don't know if this is happening in England or, say, Algeria, if it's the present day or 200 years in the future. We don't know for sure if Abel and Morgan are a lord and lady at all - that's just guesswork. We never really learn that much about Morgan, the protagonist's lover and life partner, for instance, because he is rather too self-absorbed to waste much time on her role in the story, except where it impacts on his directly. And that goes for most of the other characters in the story - Abel is like an autistic savant, far too distant to really register what is going on in the minds of others.

On the upside, Banks turns down the purple prose for a handful of action scenes - skirmishes between the soldiers and other roving military units of unknown origin - and there's quite a lot of sex in it, or at least references to it, which helps to keep it interesting. But that's not quite enough. Lengthy novels are often recommended on the grounds that they are unputdownable and therefore there is no reason to be daunted by their bulk. The opposite is true of A Song of Stone. I don't think I've ever made such a meal of so short a novel. I started reading it on March 3rd and I had it hanging around for more than two months, during which it sort of sapped my interest in reading altogether. I plan to read his new book soon and I'm hoping it will act as a sort of antidote.