He Is Elethiomel

On Use of Weapons and the reader who was fooled the whole time.

Banks wrote Use of Weapons with two timelines. The forward chapters follow a soldier named Zakalwe through his last mission for the Culture — a complicated operation involving a retired statesman named Beychae and a war that needs to end a certain way. The backward chapters, labeled in descending Roman numerals (XII, XI, X... I), follow a general through a different war: a battleship embedded in concrete, two sisters, a cousin turned enemy, and something terrible done in the night that nobody names until the very last page.

The question threading both timelines: what is the chair?

Not metaphorically. There is a physical chair in this novel that causes the forward Zakalwe to break down completely. In every room he enters, he removes the chair before anything else. He woke screaming when he saw one at his hospital bedside. He carries the aversion for centuries without being able to say why — or without being willing to.

Backward Chapter I reveals what the chair is.

Elethiomel, commanding the battleship Staberinde against his cousin's besieging forces, sent a chair to the general's headquarters. The chair was made from the bones of Darckense Zakalwe — the general's sister, Elethiomel's hostage, formerly Elethiomel's lover. Femora for the back legs. Arm bones for the seat frame. Ribs for the back. Pelvis for the base. They had tanned her skin into a cushion. "At one corner, just the hint, the start of some dark but slightly red-tinged hair."

The general — the real Cheradenine Zakalwe — went to his office and shot himself in the head. He barely survived. He gave up his generalship, abandoned his armies and his remaining sister, abandoned the war. He died two hundred years later, "not long after he received the bones."

The novel is not about Cheradenine Zakalwe.

It is about Elethiomel.

The man we follow the entire book — who we admire for military genius, pity for the chair aversion, root for as he extracts Beychae from impossible situations — is Elethiomel. He fled the war on a refugee ship using false papers and a name derived from the two sisters (Darckense, Livueta). Eventually he ended up as a pilot on an ice planet, got shot in the head by a superior who'd discovered a coup plot, was left for dead in a blizzard, and was recruited by a tall woman who walked through the storm as if it weren't there. She called him Cheradenine Zakalwe because that was what he told her his name was.

He took the dead man's name. He took the dead man's reputation. He took centuries of service that were never his to give. He built his entire subsequent existence on a theft from a man he destroyed.

Livueta Zakalwe, the surviving sister, delivers the verdict near the novel's end, watching a drone perform emergency brain surgery on the man she's spent two centuries not forgiving:

"Cheradenine Zakalwe, my brother, died nearly two hundred years ago. Died not long after he received the bones of our sister made into a chair. The man you know as Cheradenine Zakalwe is the man who took my brother's name just as he took my brother's life, just as he took my sister's life. He was the commander of the Staberinde. He is the Chairmaker. He is Elethiomel."

Then she closes the door.

The chair aversion reads, throughout the novel, as PTSD. It looks like a man haunted by something done to someone he loved — witness trauma, the kind that lodges in the nervous system and produces avoidance and hypervigilance and intrusive memory. But PTSD and guilt produce similar surface symptoms. The mechanism is entirely different. PTSD says: I was present when something terrible happened. Guilt says: I did it.

Elethiomel's centuries of warfare might be an atonement loop — using himself as a weapon for others because he forfeited the right to his own purpose. But the atonement can never complete because he cannot face what he did. He keeps returning to Livueta (his "real desire," as the backward narrative notes; Darckense was the one he held hostage, but Livueta was the one he loved). Every time he returns, she rejects him. The rejection is appropriate. There is nothing to forgive here that forgiveness could reach.

The dream-leaf vision in the forward narrative says it plainly, if you know how to read it: he sees "the Chair, and the Chairmaker — not the one he'd thought of, before; the other Chairmaker, the real one." The drug breaks through his suppression for a moment. He has constructed a story about himself as witness rather than maker. "The Chairmaker he'd thought of before" is a fiction — some deflected culpability. The "real one" is himself.

Banks buries structural tells everywhere. The forward chapters use words for numbers: "Twelve," "Eleven," "Ten." The backward chapters use Roman numerals: III, II, I. Formal, historical, distant. Because they are historical. They are not the origin story of the protagonist we're following. They are the history of the man whose name he stole — the trajectory from a garden with two sisters and a stone boat to a hospital room with a white chair and a gun.

In the backward narrative, the real Zakalwe is not the man we're inside. We watch him from angles — his commanders' conversations, Livueta's arguments with him, his face observed rather than inhabited. He feels different from the forward narrative not because Banks wrote him less well, but because he is not Elethiomel. He is the victim.

And there is one more structural detail. The epilogue shows Sma arriving to recruit a new broken soldier — Mr Escoerea, who lost his legs in the Murssay war that Elethiomel helped win. He moves in a wheelchair. The final image of the novel is Sma with her hand on the back of a chair.

The cycle begins again. The Culture finds the broken ones, offers them restoration and purpose, turns them into weapons. The epilogue doesn't offer this as a critique or an endorsement. It offers it as a fact. This is what happens. Another Zakalwe is being made.

The title. Use of Weapons. Elethiomel's governing principle, demonstrated throughout: anything can be made into a weapon. He demonstrates this at the highest possible cost. He turned Darckense into a weapon — a chair that destroyed the real Zakalwe's will to live. He turned himself into a weapon for the Culture. He turned "Cheradenine Zakalwe" — a name, a reputation, a family — into a weapon for his own survival.

What makes the chair specifically unbearable: it weaponizes love as the mechanism. The general received the bones of his sister. The weapon worked because he loved her. Elethiomel understood that the one thing that could break his cousin was this particular body, in this particular form. It is the most intimate possible use of a weapon, and the most intimate possible violation.

The backward narrative is the story of what that costs. The real Zakalwe. The real Darckense. The trajectory from garden to ruins.

The forward narrative is the story of the weapon making peace with itself, or trying to.

It fails. Two hundred years later, the Chairmaker collapses on a hospital bed crying "LIVVY!" while a drone cuts open his skull, and the last living Zakalwe says his name — his real name, the one that damns him — and closes the door.

The bomb lives only as it is falling.

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