A review by nickdablin
A Song of Stone by Iain Banks

1.0

A vicious tour de force. The writing is exquisite, which makes the subject matter all the more excruciating. The setting is left deliberately unclear - a few details aside, this could be any time or place, a ruthless condemnation of human nature without the hypocritical comfort of it being someplace other, someplace else. Society's descent into anarchy and lawlessness is at first reflected with contrast through the eyes of the protagonist, but soon his own thoroughly unpleasant nature is revealed in skin-crawling, yet disturbingly relatable, detail. This is the viewpoint of a misogynistic, perverse and secretive wretch, his own maggot-ridden underbelly exposed by the loss of social structure to seering attention. The female characters are deliberately left voiceless and objectified by the perspective, and meet predictably unpleasant ends, rendered all the more distantly vile by the warped priorities of our narrator. The novel descends smoothly from threatening tension to lurid, horrifying brutality, it's depravities accreting gradually until you are almost numbed to its horror. Yet ultimately, it's hard to see what the point of it all is, beyond a nihilistic exercise in misanthropy. As an exercise in writing irredeemable characters in an irredeemable setting, it is apocalyptically sublime. As an enjoyable novel, it is impossible to recommend.