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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An inconsistent and largely infuriating experiment in language..., 29 Feb 2008
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.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Stone Sour, 4 Mar 2003
I was first drawn to Iain Banks via his Sci Fi and if there is a parallel, this book fits into the same category as Feersum Endjin. Banks is clever, there's no doubt about that, but this book reads too much like a literary exercise, rather than a novel. I'm not against flowery prose as such, but it seems overdone here, to the detriment of the tale. My previous Banks was his first, the Wasp Factory, which, as others have said, is excellent and I guess I bought this one in order to own all of his work to date (completist that I am).The story itself is a good one. An intriguing premise, unusual characters, and the obligatory perverse sexual angle and if someone described it as such to me, I'd expect to like it. Unfortunately, the first person to third person narrative style wears thin very quickly and the main character is such an unredeeming,pompous a**ehole, if it wasn't for the fact that I have an aversion to putting unfinished books back on the shelf, I might've done exactly that...
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Song of Stone, 21 Aug 2007
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.
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