Product Description

A European nation not unlike Bosnia: armed forces roam the lawless land where dark columns of smoke rise up from the surrounding farms and houses. The war is ending, perhaps ended. But for the castle and its occupants, a young lord and lady, the trouble is just beginning.

Fearing an invasion of soldiers, the amorous couple takes to the road with the other refugees, disguised in rags. But the brutal female lieutenant of an outlaw band of guerrillas has other ideas. Just hours into their escape, the fleeing aristocrats are delivered back to the castle, where, now prisoners in their own home, they become pawns in the lieutenant's dangerous game of desire, deceit, and death.

A Song of Stone demonstrates Iain Banks's unique ability to combine gripping narrative with a soaring, voyaging imagination. This noir fable confirms his reputation as the master of things dark and debauched. Singular, haunting, and viciously wry, A Song of Stone is a tour de force of contemporary fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1049806 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
This brutal tale starts in a bleak, brutal European any-war. Abel and Morgan live in a forboding castle, alone and isolated, until the conflict intrudes on their numb lives in the form of a cruel mercenary lieutenant and her violent, ravaging men who take up residence. From there, the tale disintegrates into darkness and atrocity, punctuated by Abel's memories of earlier joy and pain. Iain Banks pushes the story steadily downward, dragging the morbidly fascinated reader into the depths of human despair. Gang rape, torture, and incest are seen through Abel's uncaring eyes--this book is not for the squeamish. And although Banks strives for a Passion play in the end, what's missing is even the tiniest kernel of real redemption. Fans of The Wasp Factory and Banks's other non-science fiction works will find familiar details here, but A Song of Stone stands alone as a fable of hopelessness. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly
"This could be any place or time," observes the narrator of this near-future fable, summing up the universality of its antiwar sentiments. Although vague in the details of geography and history, Banks's latest U.S. release (after Excession) is sharp and perceptive in its philosophical exploration of the dehumanizing potential of armed conflict. Set in a Brechtian landscape of revolution and depleted resources, it follows the tribulations of Abel, an aristocrat forced to billet Lieutenant Lute and her guerrilla army in his castle. Initially, the two treat each other with a strained civility that allows Abel to gloat secretly at the profane hordes who "commonise... what should be free from vulgar threat." As the battle draws threateningly nearer, the pretense of mutual respect dissolves and Abel finds the increasingly barbaric behavior of his captors resonating with a savagery in his own soul. Like J.G. Ballard and Anthony Burgess, Banks is a visionary whose depictions of the strange forms morality, politics and social relationships assume under the pressure of extreme circumstances fall almost by default into the realm of science fiction and horror. His impeccable prose undulates with a poetry and sensuality that transform the most ordinary movements of his tale into resonant images of beauty and terror. In less skilled hands, Abel's reluctant acknowledgment of his class's complicity in the despoliation of the country might have been just another war-is-hell story. Banks makes it the fulcrum of an emotionally intense odyssey of self-revelation. (Sept.) FYI: Simon & Schuster will simultaneously reissue Banks's first novel, The Wasp Factory (1984), in trade paper.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In an unidentified land somewhere in Europe, in the midst of an unidentified but very bloody war, a lord and lady attempt to flee their castle but are turned back by a woman lieutenant and her band of soldiers, who take refuge in the castle and make playthings of their unwilling hosts. Bombardments rain down on the castle, an old servant dies of shock, and soon the soldiers take their vengeance on the castle inmates. The images here are astonishingly grim and forceful: crucified orphans; a ludicrous hunting trip forced on the lord by the lieutenant; soldiers wrecking the castle and then tossing the bound lord into a well, where they urinate on him; the lord placing the bloodied head of the near-dead lieutenant on a millstone; the lady thrown from the parapet, one ankle bound, and drowned in the moat. But grim images aren't enough to make a story, and the lack of details?where are we, who are these people, and why are they fighting??work against the novel's success. We cannot be drawn in as the lord grimly recounts both past and present in a near-monotone, and just when we should be looking, aghast, trying to fathom human nature, we turn our heads. Worthy but nearly unbearable to read, never mind that it was a best seller in Britain.
-?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Boring rubbish
Although the use of language is most eloquent, the story doesn't go anywhwere. What story there might be is interrupted by chapters about the main character's sex life, which couldn't possibly be more out of context. This is one of the worst books I've ever read. I stuck to the end, even on the last chapter hoping there would be some redemption. But there wasn't. Not only that but it is a very dark and depressing story, to which I failed to see any point.

Loved The Wasp Factory, The Bridge, Complicity. Hated this one and Whit.

Least impressive Banks' book I've read so far...
While Ian Banks is one of the most interesting writers I've come across in the last few years, unfortunately "A Song of Stone" is one of the least engaging novels I've ever finished. Muted, yet overwrought, this tale of dissolution is less shocking than turgid. The extended and tedious stretches of "purple prose" in this disappointing book, which were apparently consciously intended to embody the self-absorbed and effete mental state of the protagonist and narrator, did little but lose my flagging interest repeatedly. Coyly lurid, and basically quite unsatisfying, this dim variation on an apocalyptic, Road Warrior-ish theme goes nowhere and then dies...Read anything else by Banks before or instead of "A Song of Stone". Though I do rather enthusiastically recommend Banks as an author, I can't in good conscience give thumbs up to this book.

Avoid this wretched book.
Let me start by saying that I'm normally a fairly big fan of author Banks stuff, both SF and mainstream. So I brought some expectations to this book. Rarely have I been so miserably disappointed. ? Overall this seemed like a dumbed-down version of "Canal Dreams", a war story by someone who has never been in a war, but thinks it's A Bad Thing, but "Dreams" was vastly the better book. Why? Well, for starters, there is not a single remotely sympathetic character in the book... well, okay, I could live with that. Banks indulges in his usual wholesale torture and slaughter, with characters being dropped down wells and then p***d on, gang-raped and then dangled into a moat to drown, and decapitated by millstones; well, okay, I'm not squeamish. If Banks wants to show us a bleak war scene, where ugly decadence meets uglier barbarism, all right; ugly can be interesting. But what broke me, what made this book an utter chore to read, was that it *wasn't* interesting. One dislikes the characters and so feels no sympathy for the various nasty things that happen to them. Worse yet, Banks writes in the first person, and the protagonist's narrative voice is almost unbearably tedious. I know Banks can write crisp, clever, interesting prose, but in this book he has chosen not to. He seems to have been trying to write a Kafkaesque parable of war and decadence (all geographical and temporal references are quite pointedly omitted; the story could be taking place anywhere in Europe in the present or near future), but the unnecessarily convoluted language destroys any chance of success. Another problem is that Banks seems to have written a war story without bothering to learn about war. In one scene, an artillery piece shells the castle to no great effect; the next day, the soldiers in the castle sortie out to where the shots came from, ambush the artillery crew, and capture the piece. Right... the crew, having fired a few shots to announce their presence (but not enough to do any real! damage), and having no air support or other protection, just sat there for a day? Uh huh. Oh, and there are some minor irritants -- a villain who talks American English while everyone else seems to be speaking English English; flashbacks to the narrator's misspent youth that have no relevance at all to the rest of the book; a female character who almost never talks but is inexplicably the object of much desire... oh, I could go on, but why bother? I can deal with Banks writing an ugly book -- hey, I loved "The Wasp Factory" -- but an ugly, boring, and stupid book, no. Do yourself a favor, and don't waste your time with this one.