The book offers more layers than an onion, and the meat of the story is found in the deepest layers. If you’re starting on Banks (and I envy you if you are- I would happily erase my memories of the Culture series just so I could enjoy them again) I would start elsewhere. Zefla Franck, once described as nearly two meters of utter voluptuousness with a brain, strolled along the lane, . A God Am I: Sharrow is captured by a team of solipsist mercenaries, each of whom believe that they are God and everyone else, including the rest of their team, are figments of their imagination. Bookends: The online epilogue puts us back on a cable car, just like the one Sharrow's mother died on.

And the ending is almost as poignant, if a bit bleak, as some of my favorite parts of the Culture (almost, anyway).

Sure neither of you'll read this two years on, but I've just finished reading ADB, and, like Yama Dai O, I don't feel quite finished. It is very, very draggy in the middle, and had I not known a Banksian ending was impending (even though I was a little let down by it, it just kind of happens), i might not have finished it. He related his concerns about the invasion of Iraq in his book Raw Spirit, and the principal protagonist (Alban McGill) in the novel The Steep Approach to Garbadale confronts another character with arguments in a similar vein.

Single Line of Descent: Sharrow is the last of the female line of the Dascen family, which the Huhsz cult has pledged to wipe out. All sorts of intriguing plot points are set up, such as the fact that Sharrow, the heroine, underwent a procedure to Except for his almost-obligatory Banks Tragic Ending, wherein Zefla -- and other characters I'd grown fond of (and some I hadn't) -- come to grief. Golter (the main planet in the story) is said in the text to be more/less "orphaned" -- as though it's simply too far for interstellar travel to be possible. The 'Dark Background' in question is that the solar system in this novel is stuck at the arse end of nowhere and there is no FTL technology.The almost randomly-inserted flashbacks often made it difficult to tell when everything was taking place, or even really where (some of the world building is slow dripped over hundreds of pages). The cult has the government’s permission and approval to capture and kill Sharrow, and she’s got one year plus one day to evade them and gain her freedom. Exposition, in the form of one of the various maybe-clones who keep trying to hire her, tells Sharrow her own backstory. Breyghun tells her that their grandfather Gorko, a collector of rare artefacts, encoded information regarding the location of the Universal Principles into the DNA of his servants.