Yet the revelation of his true identity will surprise only an inattentive reader. Dickens's last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, has a mysterious hero, John Rokesmith, who turns out to be someone different from the person we were told he was. This kind of trick has its literary precedents. Yet, though the twist may surprise us (and therefore I cannot say what it is), we surely know that it is coming. Use of Weapons comparably shows us near its conclusion that our beliefs about its main character were wrong. And here is the twist: in the last of the conventionally numbered chapters we find out that our hero (brave, rueful, suffering) is not the man we thought he was.Īs plain "Iain Banks", our author began his career with The Wasp Factory, a novel whose dénouement brought a shocking twist, in which our assumptions about the protagonist were overturned.
We know that the climax of the adventure story will not make sense until we have gone far back into the protagonist's past to discover something. There is a design to this, of course, and any skilled reader will infer that these diverging narratives must also be converging. As the former narrative sequence moves onwards with the gusto of an adventure (will he succeed, against the odds, in getting his charge to his destination? How will he be rewarded?) the latter narrative sequence moves further and further backwards in time. The two narrative sequences are interleaved, so that the "now" chapters alternate with the "then" chapters. Occasionally he has taken time out for contemplation, in one episode finding sensual fulfilment with a lover who composes beautiful but unintelligible poetry on some out-of-the-way planet, but he has always come back to fighting.
Over many years, he has been burned and blistered and variously wounded in the service of his sublimely distant, apparently all-knowing masters. Often these appear to be accounts of missions that have taxed to an extreme his capacity to survive.
Meanwhile, in a second sequence of chapters, headed by Roman numerals in reverse order (XIII, XII, XI …), we are given episodes from Zakalwe's past.
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