From the moment
I picked up the Culture books eons ago they changed the way I viewed the
natural world around me, adding a layer of mysticism to every tree, every rock
and every hill; along with a wonderment of what untold stories each has born
witness too. I think it's often a combination of the book itself and the moment
it comes into your life. I was one of those textbook cases - I had read just
about everything by Enid Blyton in English as a child, and had never managed to
make the jump (and what a jump it was!) to anything else, with a very tiny vocabulary.
Then when I was 16, an older friend who I thought was super-cool (and would
have done anything to impress) said that I should try Heinlein. I promptly got “Have
Space – Will Travel” and read it, not really understanding what I was reading
but at the same time fascinated and excited by the twisted tale. It was at that
point, I realise now, that I vowed to try and find out what literature was all
about. Many years and many hundreds of books later, I'm still on that wonderful
journey, and I'm thankful for having come across him at just the right moment
in my life. It was this fact that allowed me, many years later, to “discover”
Banks. It was just happenstance; without that I wouldn’t be
here writing these words.
So much going on
in this one. With Sma, we see the Culture in all its high-minded liberal
splendour. Then through Zakalwe we see the gritty, grubby reality of what the
Culture's interventionist ideals demand. Add to that one of the more charismatic
drones, a dual narrative and one of the most gut-wrenching twists I've ever
experienced and you've got yourself a Big Book.
"Use of Weapons" is not a 'gung-ho boy's own adventure', or if you read it that way, you missed
the point. It's a pitch-black, bitter satire of every gung-ho boy's own
adventure ever, the tale of the indefensible at the service of the supposedly
enlightened, the dark underbelly of utopia. It's vicious and cruel but it draws
us in because we are so used to this being the way of things especially in
military SF: this is the anti-Niven.
To hijack an old
axiom - it's 'The Use of Weapons', stupid. TUoW is the 'ur-Culture' novel. It's
the one where Banks' trick of basing mind warping, giga-death scale
interstellar stunt plotting around a simple, 'man done wrong' storyline built
around a relationship between two central characters works best (mostly because
of the sting in the tale). “Phlebas”, “Excession”, 'Inversions' all do the
same, but not as well as TUoW. Plus, Zakalwe is, arguably, the definitive M.
Banks bad-ass hero (and, arguably, the human blueprint for the “Mistake Not”).
You know there's a reason why he reappears at the end of “Surface Detail”.
Lastly, missing Iain a lot just now. I happened to glance at my book shelf at
the weekend and looked along the spines of my Banks collection and thought,
"I wonder when the next one's due out?". Then I remembered. Among
other things, I never got to ask him what his thing with 'The Wasteland' was
all about - ". . . Phlebas" and " . . . Windward".
Reading “Use of
Weapons” was a life-changing experience, and Zakalwe is a precious character,
his mind a brilliantly messed up the labyrinth of desires and pains.
