A Song of Stone

A Song of Stone is the Iain Banks novel (no M) that almost no one talks about and that I keep finding myself thinking about. The setting is a contemporary unnamed European country in the middle of a civil war. The narrator Abel and his lover/sister Morgan have been living in their family castle as the war's background and have decided to flee, and the flight is interrupted in the first chapter by a band of soldiers led by a charismatic Lieutenant who decides the castle would make a useful billet.

What Banks does with the setup is examine how the privileged respond to the loss of their privilege in real time. The Lieutenant's slow occupation of the castle, the inversions of authority that follow, the moments where Abel and Morgan recognize and refuse to recognize what is happening, are some of the most patient prose Banks ever wrote.

The book is short, bleak, and structurally formal in a way the form does not usually allow. The ending is one of the most affecting closures in Banks's literary work.

Four stars. Not the entry point for Banks. For readers already familiar with his SF or with his earlier literary novels (The Crow Road, The Bridge), this is essential late-period work.