The book is uncharacteristic of Banks's Culture novels, but in ways that mostly don't take away from one's enjoyment. The dialogue between the main character Gurgeh and intelligent drones Mawhrin-Skel, Chamlis, and Flere-Imsaho, is all more interesting and more illuminating than the dialogue with other humans of the Culture or with the Azadians, who are mostly characterized in broad strokes. The advanced minds of the Culture ships is mostly deep in the background, unlike some of the other books in this series by Banks, with only the slight exception of that of the Limiting Factor which is Gurgeh's ride to the distant Azadian planet. The game of Azad is only sketched out to suggest its vast complexity in the readers' minds, partly as a stand in for the confusion of society itself. For those who live in this realm, losing at Azad has consequences in one's standing in society, and the less dominant genders are mostly shut out from the game the same way their agency is minimized. Gurgeh mostly just breezes through the difficulties encountered playing Azad, so great is his mastery of game play. I never really came to believe he was in danger of assassination or bodily harm, and was really wondering whether the suggestion that a winner could become Emperor was going to be a factor for him. That didn't make him a perfectly admirable player or very laudable at all, just very well suited for the role the Culture had planned for him. A kind of inevitability of advancement undercut some of the tension in the story for me. There were revelations about the seamier sides of the barbaric Azadian culture which they were trying to hide from public view which I think set up the readers' doubts about the overall health of the Azad empire, foreshadowing the final reveal. There's effectively a ticking clock at the climax of the story, and by this point one is pretty sure that the outcome is going to go the way it does one way or another.

At the end, Gurgeh goes back home after years away and has a chance to reflect on what it all meant and where he goes from here. Again the conversations he has with the machine intelligence Chamlis becomes important, but in an amusing twist, we come to understand that he does not learn everything that came into play on his years-long adventure after all. I took this revelation about the Culture to be the main message of the book, not so much anything about what the viewpoint character was able to take away from the experience.

I listened to this as an audiobook which I think was a great plus. In the setup part of the novel I could see that a person could easily get bogged down waiting for a payoff, but having this narrated in an engaging fashion helped me stay on track. It also helped play up the comic aspects of the writing, which I had to admire.