Stonemouth by Iain BanksMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
It's been so long since I read any Iain Banks that I'd forgotten just how readable his work is. Given to me as a present shortly after the author's death, Stonemouth is set in a mythical town north of Aberdeen, but in truth it could be anywhere on the east coast of Scotland. It's a story of messed-up love involving a number of young people in their mid-twenties reconvening for the funeral of a local gangster family patriarch. Slowly, as the novel unfolds, we find out what went wrong between the central character and his ex-fiancée.
As ever with Iain Banks, the novel is written in a gently humorous style which is extremely Scottish - even EAST Scottish, no obsession with sectarian issues here, although plenty of other things make it in - and yet the book seems to travel well enough that other non-Scottish readers can enjoy its subtleties, too. I suppose Roddy Doyle manages the same trick for modern-day Dublin.
So, to sum up, I loved this. It wasn't even remotely an effort to read it at any stage, and in the end I was sorry it had finished.
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