Surface detail who is zakalwe

It's hard to care about anyone or anything until Zakalwe's mission starts to heat up So far my favorite is Player of Games. Use of Weapons is one story which is absolutely ruined if you skip ahead to the end.

Banks does a lot of stuff in many of his stories which just looks gratuitous unless you have worked up to it through the experiences of his characters. To me the magical thing about the ending of Use of Weapons is imagining the look on Diziet Sma's face when Livueta tells her the truth.

We have watched them campaign together for hundreds of pages, each learning to absolutely trust the other, Sma representing the Culture with its vast resources and, as we learn in Excession , the literal ability to read human minds if they want to badly enough , Sma is already feeling like shit because for the first time ever her superiors put Zakalwe in a position where he was expected to lose and he's not taking it very well, and then Livueta makes that act of betrayal seem like a small time college frat prank and makes the entire Culture look like idiots for not catching it.

Also my favorite Banks book. The real twist to me is that the Culture knows the truth about Zakalwe all along - they have multiple ways of knowing this beforehand and the Culture ultimately doesn't care about the twist-issue at all. He uses weapons, they use him, and around you go. Whether or not Sma knows the truth is yet another story. Off to re-read some Banks F-F, from the way Staffen-Amtiskaw is acting during the final chapter, it seems very clear that neither it nor Sma know the truth.

As for the Minds, I would suppose that they neither know nor, when they find out, care for the reasons you give. And of course we now know that they forgave him and his career continued. My high school English teacher had a poster for "Use of Weapons" up on the wall, I think it was the UK paperback cover blown up. He had never read the book, or heard of the author, he just liked the image.

When I saw the book in a used bookstore I picked it up because of the cover. It rather blew my mind as a teenager, and I've read it a few times subsequently. Zakalwe is a monster and it's always pretty clear he's a monster. There's a scene where he's writing poetry. He does it by writing what are described as field reports about the world around him, then erasing words until he gets to something that looks like the poems he's read.

When he reads books about writing poetry, they just confuse him. Banks makes you root for this monster and sympathize with him. Then there's the twist. What I like most about the novel though is the implication that nothing really changes for him because the Culture finds out.

I got the sense that it was all just a data point that helped them predict his behaviour. It in that sense it reminds me of "Consider Phlebas" which was set outside of the Culture and had a protagonist who was highly critical of it. Zakalwe isn't critical of the culture, but he is on some level a criticism of it. Zakalwe is the Culture's weapon; even if they are rather more moral about their goals, they're just as amoral and pragmatic about using him as he is about using his weapons.

Which brings me neatly to the one thing that really gets on my nerves about Bank's writing, it's how self consciously clever he can come across. Minor nitpick really. But yeah, it's something I notice a lot in his writing. The Culture books can be read as an argument over the pros and cons of interventionism, never quite coming down on one side. Log in.

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You should upgrade or use an alternative browser. Iain M Banks novels connections - Spoilers inevitable. Thread starter gsv Start date Dec 28, Go away if you're worried about IMB spoilers!

Really - piss off NOW! OK then Does anyone else feel he's just not the same character? Vatueil is a highly competent soldier and leader of men while Zakalwe is a wild-n-crazy freebooting innovator type. DotCommunist slowtime. I'll give an opinion after I've read sureface detail but bear in mind the culture are able to completely re-engineer thier personalities as well, not just their bodies. This is hinted at with that loner who gets killed while guarding decommisioned warships in Excession.

Secondly, Zakalwe is a Special Circumstances asset specifically used to influence the outcome of wars the Culture can't directly be involved in. It thus implies that the Culture, while publicly staying out of the war over hells, was actually involved through SC, who employed one of the greatest naturally created military strategists ever to have existed to influence the outcome.

It significantly changes character of the overall plot, since it shows that the Culture actually would never have let hells continue to exist, but were able to find a more direct way to remove them. That is, the character in SD didn't necessarily start out as being linked anything else as timday says - the book could stand on its own but that it felt right to make linkage. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.

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Viewed 8k times. What am I missing here if anything? By the way, the last line is Your table is ready, Mr. Vatueil, however, wasn't even a Culture citizen, he'd been involved in the confliction seemingly since it started and while he changed his perspective, he was originally sent as a spy, essentially, for the pro-Hell side. Thinking about it, I'm sure that in the time between the two books, there could have been plenty of events to lead Zakalwe to the position he found himself in as Vatueil, and I'm not necessarily disputing the 'facts'; I'd just like some clarification on my understanding of what I read.

Also, the Minds that Vatueil spoke to in that meeting didn't seem to be aware of who he was. He was accused of being a traitor but I assumed that was betraying the anti-Hell side by actually being a spy for the pro-Hell side or, indeed, vice versa and betraying the pro-Hell side to support the anti-Hell side, though that would be a bit odd coming from a Culture Mind.

Unless there was a deeper meaning to that, perhaps in reference to Zakalwe somehow betraying the Culture?

Unless I've got totally the wrong end of the stick, of course He was an outsider who did some work for them. That would make everything make more sense. Posted 22 February - PM Um The thing about Vatueil being Zakalwe will only have significance if you've read Use of Weapons, and as I say, there are some minor bordering on major spoilers for that book but there aren't any massive plot twist spoiling spoilers.

Anyway, I'm fairly settled on the connection between the 'two' characters now, but still, a discussion might be nice. Posted 22 February - PM Banks timeline hasn't exactly been easy to follow but it was my impression that Surface Detail is taking place sequentially last amongst the current books, which would I belive mean at least a century have passed since we saw him last.

Zakalwe was a freelancer the Culture used when it was convinient and Vatueils story is just the convulted plan I'd expect the minds got together and fixed up when it was decided to make a game of the hell-conflict, after all Zakalwe ain't the person to stop when it gets hard and things mostly solved themselves as the culture liked it.

All in all Surface Detail was in some part about how the greater "involved" species manipulated the lesser ones to do their dirty work.