I have to warn you. You are aware of how a story is told. A story has a beginning, a middle and an end. It has an antagonist and a protagonist. A story is told starting at the beginning and follows a protagonist as they are called to action, do things, and resolve the problem. Iain M. Bank’s Use of Weapons is not that. It is a story. It starts in the middle, or perhaps the ending, then shuffles together the chronology of chapters to tell a metanarrative about poetry, a battleship, a chair, and a chairmaker. It is a difficult read that rewards reading twice.
I have to warn you that this book is where you decide. Do you stop here, having read the first triptych of books, having covered the main thrust? Or do you move on? Do you keep reading? When my wife and I met, we were both avid readers. I had to convince her to read the big canon of science fiction. This is not that. This is the deep lore. This is both a picture of what was and what could have been. I have to warn you that the rabbit hole goes deeper.
I don’t have to warn you about our hero. Cheradenine Zakalwe. Gender: Male, height: average, scars: many, age: yes, sanity: occasional. Cheradenine is not from the Culture (Start Here); he’s a contractor. He takes a planet-buying amount of money, the promise of a probable rescue if things get too hairy, and an unaging body in return for fighting the Culture’s wars. This is a hero of a story and that story might as well be this one.
He is dropped on an infinitude of battlefields, and through personal grit and determination, as well as the willingness to do things his way rather than the ‘right’ way, he keeps getting jobs. Battling in tanks, in boardrooms, in jungles. When the Culture needs someone to fight, he is called upon.
Imagine John Wick, called out of retirement for one last job, repeated over and over again in space. Holding onto a favorite plasma cannon because it’s reliable until it isn’t. Crashing cars down causeways chased by gunships. Fighting to the last battle and crawling through the stones in a crater to spell a letter visible from space to get rescued after being shot. A man of singular determination.
But Cheradenine has an unclear vision of why he is doing it. He remembers his background, on a wartorn planet, in a civil war that took his family from him, a war between him and his adopted brother. Despite the fact that this war ended decades ago, wars and wars ago for Cheradenine, it’s still the thing which drives him.
Not all is as it seems.
Cheadenine has lived so many lives and tried to forget so much. His background gets darker and darker, driving him like no massive paycheck could. He’s running from his problems and towards his next ones. But is it right? Is doing the last job, for the last prize, for the last time, worth it? Last time he did this, it wasn’t. He’ll spend a year or ten in between jobs, living in a tarpaper shack on a beach, drunk, writing poetry, never satisfied.
The Culture, as I’ve elucidated before, is a fully automated luxury gay space utopia with no rules. However there are some pretty strong social conventions about war. Given that it is hundreds of years after the events of Consider Phelbas (The Idiran War is the major war in Culture history), there is a culture of peace and tolerance, as well as a distaste for brutality, war, and violence.
This is where a mercenary is the perfect person for the job. You hire Cheradenine, give him the vaguest of instructions, and let him do what he does best. Your unwritten social mores are untainted by the actions you take. If you take the guardrails off, they won’t follow your rules and get results you can’t or won’t. That’s the risk the Culture takes with Cheradenine.
The history of mercenaries in combat is long and unflattering. The Carthaginians famously had an army composed almost exclusively of Mercenaries. After millennia of history, we have a negative view. This is buttressed in the modern era by Blackwater and the Wagner group. Who were respectively renamed and brutally decapitated in recent years.
The fundamental problem with mercenaries is that they aren’t the in-group and need to be paid. The strength is that no one cares if they die because they aren’t in the in-group. By hiring foreign mercenaries, you can have things done rather than do things.
However, you rarely hire mercenaries to do anything other than win the current war. They are a stop-gap. No one has the foresight to see what the shape of things two wars from now will be.
Enter the tricksy bit, the part the Culture is famous for, foresight. They have been hiring Cheradenine to sometimes fight battles on the losing side. To lose valiantly, in a way that moves the needle on social progress. And they don’t tell him ahead of time. And sometimes, he’s a little bit too good and pulls victory out of the jaws of defeat.
That lack of faith in him is the other ghost haunting Cheradenine. Imagine your bosses, who you can’t actually quit, hiring you to take a fall. It’s enough to drive someone insane. So why not start with someone already a little off their rocker?
My book club recently read the first two Locked Tomb books by Tamsyn Muir. I highly recommend them. When we started the second book, I made everyone promise to read to 67% of the way through, because that is when the plot suddenly appears out of the setup and it’s a massive play out of nowhere. Use of Weapons requires reading the whole thing—100% commitment up front.
The many lives that Cheradenine has lived are mixed in, told through vignettes, each painting a picture of the man. They appear in an order. The past is revealed to us as the plotline moves along. But we are fundamentally outsiders to the story.
Imagine Tyler Durden from Fight Club. A man with no real self, but a persona that turns into reality escalated through violence. Now imagine Tyler Durden being funded by a mysterious and ostensibly benevolent space civilization as he fights his wars against credit card companies, fragile masculinity, and cheap furniture. And then imagine he doesn’t age and has unlimited money.
I don’t have to warn you further about the plot. I don’t have to tell you that this is a tough book to crack open; that should be clear. I wouldn’t be writing this if it wasn’t worth the effort, and it is. Widely regarded as one of the best Culture novels, this earns its place. The complexity of the topic and structure, as well as the rich settings, are par for a Culture book. The exploration of Heroism, Masculinity, and glancingly, Faith excel beyond the previous entries.
If you are unafraid, and forewarned, or willing, there is so much more. Despite it’s strengths, despite being in the main trinity of books of the Culture Series, despite being incredibly strong, the best is yet to come. If you are like me, you will read this book and be amazed and intrigued.
Compared to the later works in the series and leveraged against the subject matter, Use of Weapons is a 9/10 book for me. It’s a thrilling tale that rewards reading in a way only books can bring.
