Use of Weapons

Third Culture novel I’ve read and the one that made me understand what people mean when they say Banks was operating on another level in this series. The structure is the whole trick: chapters numbered forward tell one version of Cheradenine Zakalwe’s story moving through present events, chapters numbered backward in Roman numerals peel back through his past, and the two threads are heading toward the same collision from opposite directions. It took me a little while to catch how the alternating chapters were supposed to sit against each other, and once it clicked the whole book rearranged itself in my head.

There’s a twist near the end that a fair number of readers guess coming, myself included, somewhere around the two thirds mark. I won’t spoil it here because knowing it early still doesn’t take away what it does to the earlier chapters once you go back through them mentally. The plot itself is almost threadbare if you summarize it, mercenary with a complicated past helps the Culture with a delicate diplomatic mission, but that’s not remotely the point. The point is watching Zakalwe’s journey forward and backward until you understand exactly what shape of person the ending needed him to be.

Banks balances something genuinely rare here too, real horror sitting right next to real humor, sometimes in the same paragraph, and I don’t think I’ve read another author who pulls that combination off this cleanly. The scene with the gun that won’t fire and the AI’s dry commentary on it is still the funniest thing I’ve read in a Culture book, and it’s maybe thirty pages from some of the darkest material in the whole series.

Every ending in this trilogy so far has left me a little wrecked, and I still don’t fully know why. This one especially. My favorite Culture book by a clear margin, and I’ve read three now.