A Song of Stone
by Iain Banks (Little, Brown)

It can be a mirror, a testicle, death, a material for lithography, a device for converting base metals into gold. It can be cold or fiery, architectural or destructive. This hydra-headed idea is stone. In Iain Banks’s new novel, stone is conceived as the eminence grise of the world, its subterranean rough couplings painting the true story of the world in eons. You want stone as an ally, not an enemy.

The trademark monochrome etching on the book’s jacket this time depicts fallen bodies and wrecked vehicles strewn along a muddy road that leads up to a castle silhouetted against a funeral-pyre sky. True to the author’s affection for the tropes of medievalist sci-fi - the previous work of Banks’s this most closely recalls is Feersum Endjinn - the castle becomes a character in the novel, and itself is one of the meanings of the title.

The story is not geographically located, but it is set vaguely in the present. This present, however, is technologically degraded, and - not coincidentally, given Banks’s proclivities as a techno -utopianist - also morally degraded. A civil war has been ravaging the country for years; the roads are thick with the dispossessed and uprooted; knots of looters engage in bloody skirmishes.

The narrator, Abel, is a nobleman who, fearing that his beloved castle will only invite ruin, sets out with his lover on the road. Disguised among the other refugees, they travel in a horse-drawn carriage. Soon enough, however, they are unmasked by a piratical band of gun-toters, led by a female lieutenant, who forces Abel and his lover to return to the castle and house her men as guests. Things, of course, then go viciously wrong.

Banks loves to do things with names. The paramilitarymen are known by nicknames: a make of electric guitar, or a seminal 1980s Atari videogame. Abel himself is named after the son of Adam and Eve whose offering pleased God more than his brother’s. The mark of Cain has endured in mythology, but the biblical Abel remains a near-cipher. We do know of a 4th-century African sect of Christians called the Abelites, who believed that Abel remained virgin even after marriage, and practised that abstention themselves (clearly, they didn’t last). Banks’s Abel, however is not married, and has been conducting a solipsistic affair of Sadean pleasures with his lover. Oh, and his paramour is also his sister. Called Morgan (either an Arthurian nod or a joke on “morganatic” marriage: her union with Abel is barren), she is given only to rare, lapidary utterances, and it is she to whom the entire novel is addressed by Abel.

One expects something weird from a new Banks. In A Song of Stone, the reader grapples with a style of narrative voice that almost suffocates the page. This melodramatic aesthete’s prose glories in archaisms and facetious wordplay: “hoping - by these indiscretions - to make us both discrete”; “by being less than tender on occasion, I have made you rare”.

Abel is a Nietzschean aristocrat whose imagination is limited by his near-total lack of empathy (his heart is made of stone). He is fond of pompous inversions in the Latinate or Teutonic style - “like iron filings to a magnet drawn” - but when, at the story’s climax, Abel quotes a bit of Latin, the scheme of inversions is itself inverted: the Roman language in English word-order.

Cracks in Abel’s linguistic armour - deliberately planted grammatical infelicities - imply that his hauteur masks a poignant desperation to confirm his identity in a levelling ambience of war which holds no regard for his high birth. Against the odds, he is a charming guide, and his aphoristic mania can hit the mark beautifully. In a rare moment of amused self-reproach, as his life collapses around him, he muses: “Perhaps we think up our own destinies, and so . . . deserve whatever happens to us, for not having had the wit to imagine something better.” By those lights, Iain Banks’s destiny should be a colourful one. The process by which the philosopher Abel realises that, not only is he a bad soldier, but he is even outdone in the artistry of violence by the grunts he so despises, is deftly woven. A haunting set-piece occurs when Abel, forced to entertain his guests at the castle piano, turns a delicate, fluid waltz into a thing of monstrous brutality by the improvising of crass dissonances and a jackboot rhythm.

Aptly, then, the melody of A Song of Stone is arranged between these two extremes. At the end of this eccentrically fascinating novel of ideas and graven images, among corpses who expired in that singularly gleeful, horrific manner of Banks’s, Abel’s crushing defeat is that all his exquisite verbal pyrotechnics have not drowned out his lover’s clamorous silence.