I want to talk about the structure before anything else because it’s the whole reason this book works the way it does. Chapters alternate, one strand numbered forward (one, two, three) telling the present-day story of Diziet Sma trying to talk Cheradenine Zakalwe into one more job for Special Circumstances, the other strand numbered backward in roman numerals, peeling further and further into Zakalwe’s past. For the first sixty or so pages I genuinely didn’t clock what was happening, I just felt vaguely disoriented and figured that was the point, and then it clicked and I went back and reread the opening chapters with completely different eyes.

Zakalwe himself is not an easy character to love, prickly and self destructive and doing something in every backward chapter that makes you like him less, which I think is deliberate, Banks isn’t asking you to root for him so much as to keep peeling. The Culture stuff around the edges, Sma’s drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw doing most of the comic relief, is exactly the tone I go to Banks for, dry and a little vicious. What nobody warns you about going in is how genuinely funny some of this book is in between the darker material, there’s a scene with a chair that I won’t spoil except to say that when the reveal lands near the end it recontextualizes basically every backward chapter you’ve read up to that point, and I had to sit with the book closed for a minute after.

A few Culture completionists rank this below Consider Phlebas for pacing, and yeah, the structure asks more of you than a straight narrative would, some of the middle backward chapters meander before they pay off. I don’t care. This is the Banks book I’d hand someone first if I trusted they could sit with confusion for sixty pages. Five stars, and I still haven’t fully recovered from that ending.