Wounding Ruthlessness Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)

There is a small, unimportant detail in Use of Weapons that caught me more than perhaps it ought to have. In hope of extracting a favour from a university, the Culture tracks down a set of wax tablets on which the legendary lost works of a great poet are inscribed. They are held in the wall cavity of a monastery, and are almost completely intact, except for three or four that have been damaged by a fire lit by a passing shepherd.

These lost poems are not needed, in the end. But this detail caught me, because it made me sad. All these poems thought lost, and rediscovered, like a miracle—and all of this, in any case, completely imaginary—and yet three or four destroyed forever made me feel sad.

Such feelings are new and old to me. At some point I learned (from where? from who?) that to feel things about the events in stories—really to feel them—was not serious; was not scholarly. I seemed to think I should be able to see what feelings a work might evoke without the childish business of experiencing those feelings. This would mean that I was objective, and clever, and thoughtful. (I did not see that I was thinking this; I merely experienced it.)

I am a little colourblind, and sometimes when I look at a thing in low light my eyes cannot perceive its colour, and so my brain takes its best guess. I only know that this is happening when I have seen the thing before and can remember that the guess is incorrect. To work things out, to make a guess, is no substitute for direct experience. But it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference, when you have grown used to limits on your senses.

Use of Weapons is new and old to me. I first read it more than twenty years ago; I am not sure exactly when, but certainly when I was too young. (I did not know, then, that I could be too young for a sci-fi book. Such books, I had already learned from somewhere, were essentially childish, although this one was my dad’s and I certainly didn’t think that of him.) In those days, I would often notice sadness or joy when I read, and I can remember some of the moments that made me feel those things. I remembered very little of Use of Weapons; I didn’t even remember the title. I remembered only two things: the shard of bone lodged near the protagonist’s heart; and the central, horrific image that anybody who reads the novel will remember. When I decided I wanted to read it again, I had to search online for “iain m banks bone chair novel”. (And then I had to read the two Culture novels that precede it, an intellectual framework to justify rereading this novel I only wished to reread for the feelings it evoked.)

I don’t remember what I felt when I first read that climactic scene with the chair of bones. I don’t know how much too young I was for the novel, and how much or how little I understood. Reading it this time, I felt fear and excitement, not at the horrors in the narrative but at touching something sharp that had been buried in my heart for so long.

Chairs are a motif throughout Use of Weapons, both in explicit reference to the protagonist’s trauma and sitting in th ebackground. (These other chairs were much more noticeable, the second time through.) To imbue so everyday an object with such utter horror is profoundly damaging to the protagonist. It is also surely part of why the novel stuck around in my heart so potently despite how much of it I forgot: any chair that is small, or white, or delicate, or just too much like the one on the cover of the edition my dad had, brings it to mind.

This traumatic scarring is, explicitly, part of the “use of weapons” of the title: the turning of anything, banal or sacred or beloved, into a weapon, wielded towards victory at all costs. It is what the protagonist does, and why he generally wins; it is what the Culture does to him and others. But it is what Banks does, too: with chairs, with wax tablets. Perhaps this is why poetry also recurs through the novel. The protagonist believes that “the ideal man was either a soldier or a poet”, but he fails to be a poet: his idea of writing poetry is mechanical and intellectual; objective and clever. As a poet, he does not have the “numbing ruthlessness” that allows anything to become a weapon. He does not even recognise that this might be required: he thinks the two things are “polar opposites”.

Perhaps this is because the ruthlessness of the poet is not numbing, after all: they cannot use a weapon without wounding themself too. The protagonist has used a weapon this way before, in war, and is fleeing from it; for the poet, and the novelist, there is no other way. I do not know if Banks felt a little sad about those few lost poems, or a little uneasy when he saw a small white chair—but I suspect Use of Weapons could not have pierced me as it did if he did not.

Perhaps that wound, received before I was ready for it, is among the reasons I numbed, and so among the reasons that, for many years, I could not write. Neither a poet nor a reader can arrive in a “serious fuck-you-too suit”. They must accept the wounds that come, and not seek an easy kind of healing.