Use of Weapons – Iain M. Banks

I mentioned in a previous post that I had actually read a few of these banks novels when I was younger (about 15 years ago). This is the novel in the Culture series that made me stop and say “Holy shit, that was really cool” upon completing it. But as time went on, I found myself unable to remember the first fucking detail about the book, aside from a general feeling of coolness.

Actually, I do remember one detail – right at the end of the book the protagonist experiencing something so traumatic that it causes him to have an aneurysm, and how the culture drone that is monitoring him immediately get to work trying to get him through it. But otherwise I went into this as a blank as I could, although a YouTube video on The Culture did remind me something about a chair.

The novel follows a character called Zakalwe, a long time recruit of the culture who is tracked down for one more gig. The gig seems a bit trivial, and we get a lot about Zakalwe’s past. He’s a bit of a warmonger. As was the case with the two previous books, the actual Culture is peripheral to the actions in this book. It’s about a single thing that the Culture wants, and we learn about it via the details. It’s been about a week since I finished this, and I already find myself forgetting some of the details. Despite the heavy recommendations, despite people saying this is the novel you should give to people if you want to get them into the series, I don’t think I liked it more than the previous two.

The chair wasn’t all that impactful to me this time around. When I got to that part my reactions was mostly ‘oh yea, that happened.’

There was something of a squandered opportunity here. The novel has a bit of a twist ending – and I tend to hate twist endings. It would have been nice had I remembered the twist ending before rereading this to see if the twist was actually breadcrumbed properly, or if it was just thrown out there because the author could. I didn’t like it this time around, as I didn’t like the fact that the story was broken into two intertwining sections and that one of these sections is in reverse chronological order. I was fine with all of this when I read this book in my 20’s, but having just entered the ‘middle-aged man club’, it bothered me a bit. It’s not a fault of the book – I’m older, my life is harder, and the mental resources to read aren’t always there when you wake up first thing in the morning and doomscroll for half an hour to find that the world seems on fire. I just want a simple narrative, now get off my lawn.