Disclaimer – I love Iain Banks. I love his spare use of vividly evocative description. Wasp Factory is one of my favourite reads of all time. I was lucky enough to attend one of his lectures before he died and I treasure the social and ethical brilliance of his intelligence and wit.
So it is probably no surprise that I read this book in a little over 24 hours and cherished every word. It is also one of the few books I’ve read with an out bisexual male character who is presented sympathetically and shown to be more than simply his sexuality.
Stonemouth is a love story and a thriller. It is about how we grow from youth into adulthood, what changes and what doesn’t. It’s about power and domination and about a small town that isolates itself from the outside world.
Stewart returns to the town where he grew up, a town he was expelled from when he fell foul of one of two powerful families. He comes back for the funeral of that family’s patriarch and has to negotiate carefully between deference and self-preservation. The story takes place over a long weekend, but flashes back both to Stewart’s childhood and the event that sent him fleeing for his life. The flashbacks are masterfully drawn and never confusing, and we are never given more information than we need at any time, so that the mystery/mysteries unravel(s) slowly over the course of the book.
Because I am a fan, I want to share some of the beautiful pieces of prose this book contains. When I talk about the skills of writing, and the importance of including universal truths in our own stories, this is what I mean. Banks is a genius in my mind. I shall leave you with his words and my recommendation that you grab this book and put it straight to the top of your To Be Read pile.
“I suspect we all secretly think that our lives are like those very long movies, with ourselves as the principal characters, obviously. Only very occasionally does it occur to any of us that all these supporting actors, cameo turns, bit players and extras around us might actually be in some sense real, as real as we are, and that they might think that the Big Movie is really all about them, not us; that each of them has their own film unreeling inside their own head and we are just part of the supporting cast in their story.”
“[In] all this clasping, cloying pressure to accept and agree, a few of us will always pop out like pips, ejected by just those forces that seek to clamp us in … There was never an end of history, just a perceived end of the need to teach it, remember it, draw any lessons from it. Because we know better … [P]eople just need to be encouraged to be a bit more selfish and all our problems will be sorted.”
And a beautiful descriptive piece near the end that’s so evocative it brings a tear to my eye reading it again.
“I could just see her in the faint light coming from the hall through the open door. Her sheets were white, her body – lying there, both of us still too hot for sheets – looked dark, almost black against that paleness. Her hair described a dark fan across the pillow. A sheen of sweat by her collarbone reflected a little of the cool blue light spilling from the iPod dock on her bedside table, trembling with her still quick pulse.”
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