Use of Weapons, it’s about Iain Banks’s utopian Culture, and how it deals with autocrats and a freelance mercenary named Zakalwe who doesn’t like how the Culture deals with autocrats, so he takes matters into his own hands.

This is a decent novel but not one of my favorites from Iain Banks. It doesn’t stick the landing IMO.

Iain Banks is the only writer I can think of who I can think of that can get away with writing a 6 page long expositional monologue explaining exactly how the Culture, Iain Bank’s far future utopian human civilization run by AI, deals with autocrats on pre-Culture planets AND makes it not only interesting morally and philosophically, but funny (and I mean really funny as in haha laugh out loud funny).

The start of Use of Weapons in comparison when compared with the two previous Culture books, Consider Phlebas and the Player of Games, is more obviously a comedy of some sort. I’ve heard Iain Banks’s Culture series exemplifying a movie-esque writing style and the more I read of it the more I agree.

The prologue of Use of Weapons featuring two soldiers of some kind, Cullis and Zackelwe, sleeping off a hangover and drinking, respectively, while under active artillery fire exemplifies this. The mastery of comedic timing, which is rarely attempted in novels because of how difficult it is to succeed at, the writing style focusing on certain visual elements in a scene moving from one to the next all combine to give a feeling of watching a movie with a camera that’s being guided by Iain Banks hand.

Funny and philosophical, the combination of both is what Iain Banks achieves with his writing and what makes it so unique.

…

Two timelines interspersed. One told chronologically and the other told in reverse, for the most part, there’s also further back flashbacks. Both about a character known as Zakalwe, a commando/general/fixer working for Special Circumstances at the edges of Culture-space.

It’s ambitious and doesn’t live up to the expectations that are. It suffers from being one of Iain Banks’s earlier works written in the 70s that he took a second shot at a decade and half later.

The way the story is told has its moments but it doesn’t end up being worth the confusion added. Anyone can tell a story backwards, it’s not inherently interesting to me.

The “twist” at the end of the novel combined with the “Chairmaker” reveal combined are both so gratious and do NOT feel earned at all.

I’ve seen it said in other reviews that the twist reframes the entire novel. UMMMMMMM I don’t think it does. I don’t it changes almost anything. If you want to read a novel that brings to light information that reframes earlier parts of the story, check out Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. This ain’t it fam.