Lal said: > GSV Rich, can you describe Use of Weapons because I've quite clearly > failed in my attempt.
Paradise breeds few warriors. Or perhaps it just prefers to keep its hands clean. In any case, the Special Circumstances agent Diziet Sma needs the man called Cheradenine Zakalwe, a soldier recruited not from the Culture but from a primitive, war-torn planet beyond its frontiers, for one last mission. Like many Culture novels, what follows is carnage not on a galactic but on an intimate scale as we follow the man both through that last mission and, in a second story nestling in the interstices of the first, back towards the traumas that made him who he is. In his usual wonderful prose, Banks presents a parable about the price of a utopia that believes that ultimately believes only in statistical improvements, and about a haunted man struggling to find redemption. For me, it is his best novel. Rich GCU How Was That?
