It is one of the objects that ties all four of them together, in a horribly twisted way. It's not just that Cheradenine finds Darckense and Elethiomel having sex on a small, white chair it's a small, white chair that Liveuta built with her own hands. The boys made knives and swords, Darckense pots, and Livueta the furniture for a summerhouse, deep in the estate.' 'Livueta wanted to take up metalwork too, but her father would not allow her to it was not seemly. There is one element to the 'why a chair?' question (active in several discussions of the book, with many people missing the point entirely.) that seems never to be brought up: in one of the scenes of the four children, there is a point where they each learn some sort of manual skill. Mainly this is for people who do what I do, poke around the internet randomly for UoW criticism, in the probably forlorn hope that it might help to shine a light on what a great book it is, in my mind far superior to almost all his other books (the only that's close, in my mind, is Inversions, which is similarly brilliantly subtle and similarly poorly understood.) Go read the book, because it's one of the best books of the 20th century, then come back and read this.

Note that UoW has a very spoil-able plot and these comments comprehensively spoil it, so don't read this if you have not read the book. Would've flown to London for that.) Most of what follows was written as comments on various reviews, so it's not really structured as a standalone review and starts out quite randomly, but I wanted to pull it all together for my own page, I wasted too long writing it all to just dump it.

(I was also incredibly annoyed that there was a Guardian book club event, a detailed in person discussion of the book with Banks, a measly two bloody months ago, which I entirely missed. I found them, frankly, frustratingly shallow and incomplete I think the sheer brilliance, subtlety and depth of the book is not widely appreciated.

I finished re-reading Use of Weapons (the third Culture book) for about the sixth time today, and was interested in looking at some of the available criticism of it, so I looked through a few online reviews. But I suspect there's a reasonable degree of overlap between F/OSS people and Banks fans, so that should be fine. :) There is nothing to do with Fedora or Red Hat here. I realize this is the second time I've somewhat randomly dumped a large splurge of thoughts on an Iain M.

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks