The Edge Online - Reviews: Iain Banks

A Song of Stone
Iain Banks
Little, Brown, hardback, 280 pages, £16.99
Review by DM Mitchell (1997)

Iain Banks’ work is a peculiar beast, neither fish nor fowl. Not exactly avant-garde, yet not fitting comfortably into the mainstream either. It must also be distinguished from the writings of Iain M. Banks, which although marketed as SF, has less in common with the material normally dealt with at length in The Edge than does his conventional work, if ‘conventional’ is a word you can call it.

Mr Banks has certainly evolved technically as a writer since his debut with The Wasp Factory, but sadly (from the point of view of compulsive seditionaries like myself), the stylistic improvements seem to have been accompanied by a rehabilitation into human society. Whereas Frank in The Wasp Factory is supposed to stand, as Mr Banks has claimed, for all of us: ‘deceived, misled, harking back to something that never existed, vengeful for no good reason . . .’ (Esoterra magazine, Spring 1996), the narrator of A Song Of Stone stands firmly on the inside. And one wonders, while reading the book, if Mr Banks’ viewpoint has changed over the years.

The fact is, whereas Mr Banks’ earlier works were scathing, misanthropic and cynical, A Song Of Stone seems (at least to me) to promote conservative (with a small ‘c’) values. In the face of post-war chaos, the narrator tries, with varying degrees of success, to salvage aspects of a lost way of life which he still cherishes. In this way, like Frank, he resembles most of us.

A Song Of Stone kicks off with an understated account of refugees and the first encounter with a company of battle-weary soldiers. More importantly it introduces the book’s other predominant character – the lieutenant, who is a woman, and portrayed more clearly than the narrator’s wife who ultimately seems little more than an ornamental accessory, despite the narrator’s profession of love for her. The lieutenant is a real woman, with a brain, guts and a tongue in her head. She is the flip side of the narrator, and the tension between the two characters is the focus point of the book, and a metaphor for the struggle between idealism and pragmatism in the world.

The opening chapter is written with a luminous simplicity that reminded me of JG Ballard’s disaster novels, but unlike Ballard’s works, which dispense with personal trappings and everyday considerations in favour of symbols and glyphs, Mr Banks’ book dwells on the minutiae of human interactions. At times it reaches peaks of tense brilliance, but I found that a few overly ‘wordy’ chapters dispersed their power and at times I floundered, caught between the desire to put it down and read something else, and to carry on with it in case it picked up again. As it happens, I’m not going to tell you the rest of the plot, so you’ll have to read it yourself. Good, if a bit overwritten.