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The horror and absurdity was rather higher than I expected, almost medieval or Dune like fight for the death level, like Indiana Jones in space but more horrid
It would have helped if the Culture had used some sort of emblem or logo; but, pointlessly unhelpful and unrealistic to the last, the Culture refused to place its trust in symbols. It maintained that it was what it was and had no need for such outward representation. The Culture was every single individual human and machine in it, not one thing. Just as it could not imprison itself with laws, impoverish itself with money or misguide itself with leaders, so it would not misrepresent itself with signs.

Great concepts with the post scarcity The Culture and Planets of the Dead and gigantic, galactic spanning space battles, sentient AIs shepparding humanity, but I was not super impressed by the execution of Consider Phlebas. This is rather Stephen King like or American Horror Story: The Galactic edition.
I even wrote down Candide in space in terms of extreme events befalling one person.

Idirans (religious aliens) are in a holy war against The Culture (liberal, hedonistic and technologically advanced, powered by AI and advanced weaponry called knife missiles or infinitely malleable objects which can turn into guns). Ian M. Banks starts things of with a bang, rather scatologically as well, inside a prison palace. Soon the fusion bombs are flying past us and we are very far from Boring old-fashioned biological life.
Contact, the "army" of The Culture and Special Circumstances being the spy branch, have some epic burns to our main character: Empathize with stupidity and your halfway thinking like an idiot
Horza, a shapeshifter mercenary, who fervently supports the case of the Idirans against AI and the all-encompassing influence of The Culture, seems rather a superhero, surviving anything in an Indiana Jones like fashion, or maybe James Bond given how his relationship with women soon and without exceptions develop. First case in point, after escaping the opening scenes, is an encounter with homicidal space pirates: I’ve got no place on the ship for someone who doesn’t have a taste for a little murder now and then

Still, even though I was not taken by the main character, it is interesting how many different humanoids there are, all subtly different biologically, with Culture humans being renowned for their "upgrades", including being able to supress pain at will. Marain as central language of The Culture is a kind of galactic lingua franca, which is interoperatable between humanoids and robots/AI. We have Hyperspace travel at 10 lightyears per hours (which does raise the question for me if there is something like an ansible with direct communication across light years to tie events together and create a coherent culture).

Soon Horza is firmly embedded in the Clear Air Turbulence (CAT), a mercenary ship, but the whole plot there pales compared to the brief glimpses one get of the tremendous scale, with 18 trillion humanoids in the Culture, orbitals over 3 million kilometers long, flatter than the surface of any planet and 1.000 year old drones instructing the best of humanity to deal with crisis unfolding. I thoroughly wished for more Ursula K. Le Guin in the rendition taken, instead of more action, filled with one-liners to show how tough Horza is:
Don’t you have a belief?
Yes, my own survival.

At one point I think the conclusion is he literally survived a nuke, and when the crazy cannibals popped halfway up I was pretty much done with hoping this be a cerebral read.
Time and time again the author zooms into the shock value, for instance of games where lives are really lives of people who die when you fuck up at a card game, instead of just making his world and story speak for itself. You did not send moderates on missions like this is used as an excuse to introduce completely fanatic warriors and I completely lost the train plot at the end to be fair, and why do people think bastard is the worst curse in this world?
I disliked Horza quite a bit, so even the resolution of the book felt a bit hollow to me, with these kind of quotes falling flat for me:
What she didn’t know about him was only what he didn’t know about himself

I even wrote down why are the appendices more engaging than the main story, since these detail 851.4 billion dead, 19 million ships lost, 53 planets and moons destroyed and 6 suns ended. One of the largest wars in the last 50.000 years. So much potential but a meagre 2.5 stars from me.
Hopefully I'll read other Culture stories that are less action oriented but show more of the fascinating galaxy.