Sure, it has some rough parts, and it's not perfect, and Banks certainly wrote better novels. But it's the book that (together with Look to Windward, which is a spiritual sequel referencing the events in Phlebas) most clearly and beautifully articulates Banks' anti-war sentiment.
In this novel, nothing is gained. Almost everyone dies. There are no heroes, though there's some nobility in the fighting. In the grand scheme of things, the events of the novel end up not mattering one iota. All that remains is the trauma of the survivors. Ultimately, war is meaningless and leaves everyone scarred.
It's also the one novel that shows the Culture from an outsider's perspective, painting Special Circumstances in a less flattering light than other Culture novels.
By the way, I wrote those dissenting comments in that Goodreads thread. The reviewer is notorious on Goodreads for giving almost everything written before 1950 single-star ratings (one commenter called him a "time-traveling Victorian"). I'm not sure what his purpose was in even reading Iain M. Banks. About the only recent thing he's liked is Watchmen and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Sure, it has some rough parts, and it's not perfect, and Banks certainly wrote better novels. But it's the book that (together with Look to Windward, which is a spiritual sequel referencing the events in Phlebas) most clearly and beautifully articulates Banks' anti-war sentiment.
In this novel, nothing is gained. Almost everyone dies. There are no heroes, though there's some nobility in the fighting. In the grand scheme of things, the events of the novel end up not mattering one iota. All that remains is the trauma of the survivors. Ultimately, war is meaningless and leaves everyone scarred.
It's also the one novel that shows the Culture from an outsider's perspective, painting Special Circumstances in a less flattering light than other Culture novels.
By the way, I wrote those dissenting comments in that Goodreads thread. The reviewer is notorious on Goodreads for giving almost everything written before 1950 single-star ratings (one commenter called him a "time-traveling Victorian"). I'm not sure what his purpose was in even reading Iain M. Banks. About the only recent thing he's liked is Watchmen and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.