Use of Weapons, Revisited

I just finished listening to Use of Weapons. I first read it shortly after it was published, and it remains my favorite book — well, maybe second to Excession — by Iain M. Banks (who is sorely missed), and one of my favorite SF novels ever.

Spoilers. Please, if you haven’t, go read the book.

First of all, after it finished and I had relistened to the last couple of chapters just to get them straight in my head, I immediately went looking for any essays about the end, and found this very nice one. What follows was intended to be a comment on this post, but WordPress.com wouldn’t cooperate so I’m posting it here.

I’d like to add my own thoughts which are a little counter to the writer of the referenced post’s wholly negative take on Elethiomel. First, he never tries to blurt out a justification for his actions to Livueta, despite many opportunities. Even in his own internal monologues he never tries to justify his own actions. Similarly, if anything Livueta remembers him more fondly than he remembers himself (at least before the chair). If he’s a psychopath, he’s remarkably wracked by conscience.

In an earlier flashback he wonders what it is he wants from her, and considers and (if I recall correctly) rejects forgiveness.

If we read between the lines, we might conclude that the regime to which the Zakalwes are loyal is actually pretty horrible. The strong implication is that Elethiomel’s family narrowly escapes annihilation only owing to their being sheltered by the Zakalwe’s. It has the feel of Tsarist Russia about it.

Elethiomel, for all his negative qualities seems naturally attracted to the nicer side in every scrap he ends up in. When he freelances in the early flashbacks, he’s not doing anything public, he’s quietly and secretly using his wealth and power to (crudely) attempt to do the kinds of things the Culture does.

The book is full of symmetries. If you’d like one more, the Zakalwes are “nice” people loyal to a terrible regime, whereas Elethiomel is a ruthless bastard who works for good, or at least less terrible, regimes.

So it’s perfectly possible that the rebellion he led was in fact very much a heroic and well-intentioned thing, but at the end, when it was doomed, he fell victim to his two great weaknesses — the unwillingness to back down from an untenable position (if he looks like he’s losing, he simply keeps on fighting to the bitter end) and his willingness to use ANYTHING as a weapon no matter how terrible. I think it’s perfectly possible that he did not kill Darkense, but was willing to use her corpse as a weapon because it gave him one more roll of the dice. What did he want to say to Livueta, after all?

I further submit that his final unwillingness to perform the decapitation attack in his last mission shows that he has actually learned something at long last. And this is the thing in him that has changed and caused him to start screwing up (from Special Circumstances’ point of view) in missions since he was, himself, literally decapitated.