That's ultimately what gives the novel its great power: Zakalwe/Elethiomel is a perfect symbol of how the Culture's quest for progress and peace by any means necessary turns them into amoral monsters willing to turn anything into a weapon for their cause. Elethiomel's dissociation from his own identity rhymes with the Culture's dissociation from their own biases and compulsions. His self-hatred makes him the perfect pawn for the elements of the Culture who are trying to act selflessly. He embodies the contradiction of their efforts: he is an amoral murderer seeking to atone for his unforgivable crimes by trying to use war to create peace. Zakalwe, for reasons that are slowly revealed over the course of the novel, is the perfect weapon for the Culture to use in its proxy wars. The ironies and contradictions of this meddling are the central theme of Use of Weapons.

Sometimes, as in this book, they are about the attempts by the secret military wing of the Culture to secretly guide less advanced civilizations toward a less militaristic mode of social organization.

They are almost all about war and about the secret military wing of the anarchist utopia that is the Culture. I think I've already mentioned that one of the things that has struck me about the Culture novels as I've been reading them lately is how much they are military novels. (The revised version was published in 1990.) But to what purpose are the twists and structure put? The purpose is a complex meditation on the use of weapons. Banks says that this structure is actually a simplification of what he came up with when he originally wrote the book in 1974. So this novel is famous for its twist ending and for the elaborate structure (borrowed in a slightly different form by Christopher Nolan for his memory puzzle movie, Memento) in which one set of thirteen chapters moves forward in time in alternation with another set of thirteen chapters that moves backward in time. He is not Cheradenine Zakalwe, he's Zakalwe's cousin, Elethiomel, who murdered Cheradenine's sister (who was Elethiomel's lover) and made a chair of her bones in attempt to destroy Zakalwe's spirit and thus win the war he was waging against him. What was interesting about the reread was that I've always remembered the big reveal of the bone chair that has haunted the protagonist of the novel his whole life and driven his hunger for atonement, but I'd completely forgotten the book's second punchline, which is that the protagonist isn't who we (or he) thinks he is.

Use of Weapons was the first (and perhaps only) Banks novel to really bowl me over, so it's fitting that it's the first one of his that I've now read a second time. Randy_byersIt's impossible to write seriously about this novel without serious spoilers, so THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

Use of weapons by iain m banks