This is the first Culture novel. The Culture is one of the acclaimed sci fi series of our time, but most people recommend skipping this one and starting with The Player of Games. Most people are absolutely right. The main plot is interesting, but there is a long side trek and the protagonist is neither likable nor compelling.
A galactic war rages between technologically supreme space hippies (The Culture) and a race of biologically immortal religious warriors (the Idirans). Horza is a shape-shifting spy and assassin in the service of the Idirans, fighting for messy biology over computed perfection. He is called upon when a young Culture Mind falls onto a Planet of the Dead where Horza's race are caretakers but Culture and Idirans alike are forbidden to go.
At least, that is what the book should eventually be about. The first hundred pages feature Horza narrowly surviving four disastrous situations through luck. However much agency our protagonist may be trying to show, he is entirely swept along by events outside his control and saved by outside parties. His shape-shifting abilities are mentioned but irrelevant throughout this, and they only affect a couple of plot points that could be written around. His backstory talks about spying and assassination, but he is not doing that here.
Horza himself is not likable. As his career implies, he is an anti-hero, except for showing no heroism. The closest he comes is not wanting to kill someone; not that he lets the kid live, just that he does not want him dead. His personal interests include brute survival at any cost and discriminating against non-carbon-based lifeforms.
The book and series do not get into it this early, but if you know The Culture, you know that Horza is on the wrong side of this war both morally and practically. The Culture is like a model of how everything could work out right with a society hovering around the technological Singularity. They really would like everyone to live happily and safely with good nutrition and education and a chance to fully explore what life can bring. They are also willing to annihilate entire solar systems that are hostile to them, although they are polite enough to offer evacuation before unleashing the anti-matter. (This book is set while the space hippies are learning how to do that "annihilation" bit, before "never get involved in a land war in Asia" is replaced with "do not fuck with The Culture.")
I usually give a book 20% of its length to prove itself, which was the point where I was going to quit, but a promising bit at 20% and Iain Banks's reputation bought enough trust to get to 30% and then skimming the rest. There are some good scenes later on. An editor who cut 200 or 300 pages from the book could make it worthwhile. If you have good skimming skills, you may be able to extract value from this book efficiently enough to make it a 2.5. While Horza and his human-ish companions are unappealing, it gets good when we have Yalson or a representative from the Idirans or The Culture "on-screen." They interact well with everyone, especially Horza.
I had hoped that something would make me pause and start reading normally. After those first hundred pages, I read as far as the next disaster our protagonist survived through more luck. That one spun into another, and then there were cannibals. A sentient shuttlecraft offered him no-questions-asked rescue, so he murdered the Mind running it and took the shuttle to go murder someone else and take his ship. Then there was a card game where lives were gambled. Taking us to the half-way point, our protagonist killed a bunch of other innocents in an escape, including wrestling for a ship's controls so that he could steer it through a crowd of people between him and the exit. This is a spaceship, recall, so the lucky ones were killed by the impact, with the rest caught in the blast from the ship's fusion drives.
It's nice to have the main plot return about half-way through the book, but why would I want to follow this protagonist? It is not as though he is charismatic or audacious enough to call what he is doing "exploits" or "antics." Most of it is low-grade thuggery, sometimes upgrading to thuggery amidst spectacle. We digress for half the book so that he can connect with a band of even less appealing thug redshirts (think "Krull" only less so). Horza is on a moral crusade against people who want to bring health and prosperity to the universe because they use super-intelligent computers and can be condescending. The murder of the sentient shuttle is a microcosm of the entire thing: in the face of a potentially optimistic and friendly setting, some people want to make it a crapsack world for themselves and everyone in their reach, out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
If I want that, I can go find some rich kids who cut themselves.
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