This is the third book of the Culture series and once again Iain M. Banks surprises me with how different it is from the previous two books. The first book showed the Culture from the perspective of its enemies. The second provided a look at a typical citizen of the Culture who is asked to help treat with another civilization. This one is again a story from the perspective of someone who is not born of the Culture and works for them as a sort of mercenary as part of their Special Circumstances organization. While there is a wider plot, the novel is largely a deep dive into the psyche of its protagonist. Personally while I commend the ambition and sophistication of this approach, I can’t say that I liked this novel terribly much as I don’t find examining the tortured minds of ex-soldiers that appealing and I question why the Culture needs to employ such people for their needs.

The story of Cheradenine Zakalwe is told in two parallel narratives. One is set in the ostensible present, after Zakalwe has left the service of the Culture. Fearing that he is using Culture technology and training for his own purposes, his former handler Diziet Sma is sent to find him. Soon after that, they recruit him again to extract and inspire a former companion who is still a revered political leader to forestall a war that could embroil the entire cluster. Meanwhile the other track proceeds in reverse chronological order, covering some of Zakalwe’s previous missions for the Culture, reaching back to his first encounter with the Culture and final to his own childhood experience of being to an aristocratic family on a pre-spaceflight civilization. It shows how the events of his life has shaped him into being an ideal soldier who uses any and all weapons on hand to win any conflict and yet is driven to self-loathing and suicide by the sacrifices he has made and the horrors that he has committed.

This is a rather wordy novel and the unconventional structure makes it somewhat difficult to parse at first. I’m inclined to think that quite a lot could be cut from the novel to streamline it. For example it starts with a lengthy passage about the life of Diziet Sma who as it turns out is not a truly significant figure in Zakalwe’s life at all and seems to have little agency. The only point of showing so much of her life would be to illustrate why a citizen of the Culture, even one inclined to join Special Circumstances, has a temperament that is fundamentally unsuited for violence. This could help explain why the Culture has to rely on external mercenaries like Zakalwe in their attempts to intervene in less advanced civilizations. Still I’m not entirely satisfied with this explanation as Sma is partnered with the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw who is certainly bloodthirsty enough and should be smart enough to plan complex strategies, especially with the existence of the shipboard Minds. It feels to me that the novel is simply wordy for its own sake and it feels clumsy to me. In later interviews, Banks revealed that he originally a far longer novel about Zakalwe long before he ever envisioned the Culture but it was too problematic to publish. If we regard this as a cleaned-up version of that earlier effort, it’s easier to understand why some of these structural problems still persist.

Another reason why I’m not too happy with this book is that the Culture’s manipulations to help less advanced civilizations seem so crude. I get that their aim is to reduce suffering and they are constrained by the need to remain discreet as they don’t want to set up one of their own to replace local tyrants and fear a backlash if knowledge of their interference becomes widespread. But setting up Zakalwe as an immensely rich parvenu no one has heard of to attract worldwide attention or having him take charge of the military campaign of a rebellious cult seems like too much interference to me. Then there’s also how the Culture’s technology is far ahead of anyone else yet they still fail at critical times, such as how they genuinely lose track of Zakalwe at times when he desperately needs help, and the Minds seem surprised when Zakalwe succeeds where they actually mean for him to fail. No doubt this makes for a more exciting and entertaining story than one in which the Minds just effortlessly accomplish anything they wish. But it’s inconsistent with their capabilities as displayed in the previous book and makes them seem so inelegant.

I do appreciate what Banks was trying to do with the character of Zakalwe, This is a man so traumatized by war that even when allowed to see the inside of Culture society he can hardly believe that it is real. When he comes to accept that the Culture really are the good guys hs is relieved that he is finally able to fight for a cause that is unequivocally righteous even though he believes that the Culture is too merciful. It is doubly tragic then that he follows the Culture’s directives even when he doesn’t understand what the overall plan is and continues to believe when the Culture assigns him to lead the side that is supposed to lose. The novel ends with a twist that I found easy to see coming but there’s no denying that it makes for a powerful climax to a horrifically tragic life. As I said, I like what Banks is trying to do here but I’m not sure that his prose is good enough to match his ambition, especially as this sort of deep psychological examination is more the province of mainstream literature. The ending further paints the Culture is a poor light. It beggars belief that the Culture would recruit and trust Zakalwe so much without knowing his full life story and cruel that they would use him in such a way that only deepens his trauma. This isn’t a redemption story. The man needs therapy and rehabilitation, not new targets to exercise his war skills on.

Overall this novel feels out of place and out of sequence to me, exactly as I would expect from a work whose genesis was far earlier in the writer’s career. It just doesn’t feel like a mature work and is so wordy that reading became quite a slog for me. There are parts of it that I admire but I didn’t enjoy reading this book at all.