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The Bridge
The man who wakes up in the extraordinary world of a bridge has amnesia, and his doctor doesn't seem to want to cure him. Does it matter? Exploring the bridge occupies most of his days. But at night there are his dreams. Dreams in which desperate men drive sealed carriages across barren mountains to a bizarre rendezvous; an illiterate barbarian storms an enchanted tower under a stream of verbal abuse; and broken men walk forever over bridges without end, taunted by visions of a doomed sexuality.
Lying in bed unconscious after an accident wouldn't be much fun, you'd think. Oh yes? It depends who and what you've left behind.
Which is the stranger reality, day or night? Frequently hilarious and consistently disturbing, THE BRIDGE is a novel of outrageous contrasts, constructed chaos and elegant absurdities.
Lying in bed unconscious after an accident wouldn't be much fun, you'd think. Oh yes? It depends who and what you've left behind.
Which is the stranger reality, day or night? Frequently hilarious and consistently disturbing, THE BRIDGE is a novel of outrageous contrasts, constructed chaos and elegant absurdities.
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
282 people are currently reading
6217 people want to read
About the author
Iain Banks
40 books4,895 followersThis author also published science fiction under the pseudonym Iain M. Banks.
Banks's father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was once a professional ice skater. Iain Banks was educated at the University of Stirling where he studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. He moved to London and lived in the south of England until 1988 when he returned to Scotland, living in Edinburgh and then Fife.
Banks met his wife Annie in London, before the release of his first book. They married in Hawaii in 1982. However, he announced in early 2007 that, after 25 years together, they had separated. He lived most recently in North Queensferry, a town on the north side of the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge.
As with his friend Ken MacLeod (another Scottish writer of technical and social science fiction) a strong awareness of left-wing history shows in his writings. The argument that an economy of abundance renders anarchy and adhocracy viable (or even inevitable) attracts many as an interesting potential experiment, were it ever to become testable. He was a signatory to the Declaration of Calton Hill, which calls for Scottish independence.
In late 2004, Banks was a prominent member of a group of British politicians and media figures who campaigned to have Prime Minister Tony Blair impeached following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In protest he cut up his passport and posted it to 10 Downing Street. In an interview in Socialist Review he claimed he did this after he "abandoned the idea of crashing my Land Rover through the gates of Fife dockyard, after spotting the guys armed with machine guns." 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.
Interviewed on Mark Lawson's BBC Four series, first broadcast in the UK on 14 November 2006, Banks explained why his novels are published under two different names. His parents wished to name him Iain Menzies Banks but his father made a mistake when registering the birth and he was officially registered as Iain Banks. Despite this he continued to use his unofficial middle name and it was as Iain M. Banks that he submitted The Wasp Factory for publication. However, his editor asked if he would mind dropping the 'M' as it appeared "too fussy". The editor was also concerned about possible confusion with Rosie M. Banks, a minor character in some of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves novels who is a romantic novelist. After his first three mainstream novels his publishers agreed to publish his first SF novel, Consider Phlebas. To distinguish between the mainstream and SF novels, Banks suggested the return of the 'M', although at one stage he considered John B. Macallan as his SF pseudonym, the name deriving from his favourite whiskies: Johnnie Walker Black Label and The Macallan single malt.
His latest book was a science fiction (SF) novel in the Culture series, called The Hydrogen Sonata, published in 2012.
Author Iain M. Banks revealed in April 2013 that he had late-stage cancer. He died the following June.
The Scottish writer posted a message on his official website saying his next novel The Quarry, due to be published later this year*, would be his last.
* The Quarry was published in June 2013.
Banks's father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was once a professional ice skater. Iain Banks was educated at the University of Stirling where he studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. He moved to London and lived in the south of England until 1988 when he returned to Scotland, living in Edinburgh and then Fife.
Banks met his wife Annie in London, before the release of his first book. They married in Hawaii in 1982. However, he announced in early 2007 that, after 25 years together, they had separated. He lived most recently in North Queensferry, a town on the north side of the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge.
As with his friend Ken MacLeod (another Scottish writer of technical and social science fiction) a strong awareness of left-wing history shows in his writings. The argument that an economy of abundance renders anarchy and adhocracy viable (or even inevitable) attracts many as an interesting potential experiment, were it ever to become testable. He was a signatory to the Declaration of Calton Hill, which calls for Scottish independence.
In late 2004, Banks was a prominent member of a group of British politicians and media figures who campaigned to have Prime Minister Tony Blair impeached following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In protest he cut up his passport and posted it to 10 Downing Street. In an interview in Socialist Review he claimed he did this after he "abandoned the idea of crashing my Land Rover through the gates of Fife dockyard, after spotting the guys armed with machine guns." 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.
Interviewed on Mark Lawson's BBC Four series, first broadcast in the UK on 14 November 2006, Banks explained why his novels are published under two different names. His parents wished to name him Iain Menzies Banks but his father made a mistake when registering the birth and he was officially registered as Iain Banks. Despite this he continued to use his unofficial middle name and it was as Iain M. Banks that he submitted The Wasp Factory for publication. However, his editor asked if he would mind dropping the 'M' as it appeared "too fussy". The editor was also concerned about possible confusion with Rosie M. Banks, a minor character in some of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves novels who is a romantic novelist. After his first three mainstream novels his publishers agreed to publish his first SF novel, Consider Phlebas. To distinguish between the mainstream and SF novels, Banks suggested the return of the 'M', although at one stage he considered John B. Macallan as his SF pseudonym, the name deriving from his favourite whiskies: Johnnie Walker Black Label and The Macallan single malt.
His latest book was a science fiction (SF) novel in the Culture series, called The Hydrogen Sonata, published in 2012.
Author Iain M. Banks revealed in April 2013 that he had late-stage cancer. He died the following June.
The Scottish writer posted a message on his official website saying his next novel The Quarry, due to be published later this year*, would be his last.
* The Quarry was published in June 2013.
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November 28, 2021
In his precise usage of vivid language and images, Iain Banks' The Bridge will bring to mind Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle. Also, since Iain frames his tale as the inner workings of the mind while his narrator is in a coma, I'm reminded of that mind centered, mind spinning classic, The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat.
The narrator, let's call him John since that's the name he's known by in his coma dreams, provides the basic facts: single, Scottish, age thirty-six, he was driving at high speed on a bridge and crashed into another car.
John's mental state from beginning to end is a tumble: sometimes he's living deep in his coma dreams, interacting with a psychiatrist (John suffers from amnesia and can't even remember his own name), meeting a lovely lass by the name of Abberlaine Arrol, exploring the surrounding multi-level city forming part of a nearly infinite bridge structure and sometimes John is lucid enough to relate his past life: his family, his girlfriend Andrea, his years of study.
The progression chapter to chapter, section to section is intricate and frequently shifts from one mental state to another. To provide a sampling of what a reader will encounter when turning the pages, I'll focus on a handful of provocative scenes, as per -
DREAM WITHIN DREAM WITHIN DREAM
John's psychiatrist believes John's inability to remember his past results not so much from head injuries but is rather linked to psychological shock. Therefore, answers to questions his amnesia poses are to be found in John's dreams.
How fascinating! While dreaming in a coma, John dreams he's seeing a shrink and is told his dreams hold the key to greater understanding. Therefore, when John returns to his bridge apartment and dreams at night, he pays great attention, recording the details in a diary the next morning. And what vivid, surreal dreams! Among the most astonishing parts of Iain's novel.
NUTTY AS A FRUITCAKE
Prior to entering Dr. Joyce's office (yes, echoes of James Joyce), John spots something highly unusual about the shrink's next patient, a thin, worried-looking man sitting with eyes closed on a seat with a policeman sitting on top of him. Dr. Joyce doesn't give this arrangement a second glance.
John asks why there's a policeman sitting on his next patient, to which Dr. Joyce replies what he, Mr Berkeley, thinks he is varies from day to day, and today Mr Berkeley thinks he's a chair cushion.
Recall philosopher George Berkeley's “to be is to be perceived.” This happening (initially John thought Mr Berkeley was part of some minimalist radical theater group) highlights how the entire novel hums along with a strong Alice and Mad Hatter tea party vibe.
GRAINY BLACK & WHITE
John's apartment features a television built into the wall, the screen clicks itself on and begins to hiss. As per usual, in grainy black and white, there's a man in a hospital bed hooked up to various machines. John wonders, how is this happening, and why? As readers, we also wonder if what John sees on the television is perhaps himself in his hospital bed in a coma via some type of mental projection or out-of-body experience. And how does John's viewing fit within the context of his overall coma dream?
FREUDIAN SLIPS
Following a night of embarrassing sex dreams (gulp!), John reflects, “I decided over breakfast that I would lie about my dreams....There is no point in telling him the sort of things I have really been dreaming about: analysis is one thing, but shame is quite another.”
Then, during his actual session with Dr. Joyce, recounting his dreams (sort of) John receives a shock. He gapes at Dr. Joyce open-mouthed. Coming to a greater state of awareness, John thinks to himself: I am dreaming and you are something from within myself (authors italics).
What does it all signify? Does Dr. Joyce see through John's attempts to cover up, to deceive him? Is this why the good doctor tells John “We have to go on to another stage of the treatment.” Turns out, what the doctor means by this is hypnosis. The very tangled plot begins to warp, bend and thicken.
GREEK MYTH AND JUNGIAN ARCHETYPES
John's dreams becomes the stuff of what Joseph Campbell termed “The Hero's Journey,” with images from Greek myths and Medieval legends. During one outing with that beautiful dream lady, Abberlaine Arrol, John is asked about his belief in and his desire to see a Kingdom and a City.
Does Miss Abberlaine Arrol function for John as his unconscious feminine side, what Jung termed the anima? And what are we to make of Abberlaine's drawing, the one she created while on their outing?
John inspects Abberlaine's finished artwork: “The broad platform of the marshalling yard has been sketched in, then altered; the lines and tracks look like creepers in a jungle, all fallen to the floor. The trains are grotesque, gnarled things, like giant maggots or decaying tree trunks; about, the girders and tubes become branches and boughs, disappearing into smoke rushing from the jungle floor; a giant, infernal forest. One engine has become a monster, rearing out of the ground; a snarling, fiery lizard. The small, terrified figure of a man runs from it, his miniature face just visible, twisted in a shriek of terror.”
SURPRISE!
Iain Banks must have enjoyed many chuckles writing the section where John returns to his apartment only to find a crew of Bridge employees carting all of his possessions out. He's being relocated to a lower section with lower status and much lower weekly allowance. John confronts the foreman but it's no use – the foreman shows John the order signed by Dr. Joyce. Ahhh! And then, the final insult: the foreman demands John surrender the very cloths he's wearing and is handed a pair of low status green overalls. And the insults continue as John attempts to reclaim a shred of respectability. I could hardly stop laughing.
MASHING OF LANGUAGE
At different points in the narrative, dream within dream, John's language veers off into heavy Scottish brogue. “Noaw, ahm doin no to bad these days; servies mutch in dimand like thay say; maynly becoz all these wizerds an that are so fukin sofistikaytit that they fogett theeir sum.” Yet another reason why John's doctor shares the same surname as James Joyce.
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY
Will John be given a choice: stick with his coma dream or rejoin our more conventional dream, you know, the one we all share, the one where you're reading this review on your screen? For Iain Banks to tell.
Scottish author Iain Banks, 1954-2013
June 4, 2023
Iain Banks was a genius and The Bridge is one of his greatest works. Few would disagree with the first statement, but some might disagree with the last.
Why? Because this novel utilizes a pretty cheesy central plot device – If you can look past this cliched premise you will find yourself immersed in one of the best books I've read in the last decade.
If you've read any Banks you'll know that he was as comfortable with literary fiction as he was with Science Fiction, writing many books in both genres during his career. The Bridge falls into the litfic section of his output, but contains enough weird and speculative elements to appeal to those (like me) whose tastes tend towards genre.
The story is split three ways.
The first character, Alex, wakes on a bridge. However, this is no ordinary bridge. This bridge is a world, a vast, many-levelled structure that spans a seemingly endless sea, stretching off into infinity in either direction, an entire civilization existing within its steel stanchions and concrete buttresses.
Alex lives in this strange world, unsure how he came to be there exploring his new home and meeting with a psychiatrist to discuss his disturbing dreams. In particular he is enduring a series of sometimes hilarious, sometimes horrifying nightmares where he is making his way across a strange and magical world as The Barbarian- a sword-swinging Scottish-brogue wielding warrior who is the second major character in the narrative.
While Alex explores his own mind and his environs we also follow the life of a young man, James Orr, who is making his way in our world (There are some parallels with Banks' character Adrian Cubbish in Transition, although Adrian is a bit more of a chancer than James).
James finds success, with all its trappings, but finds his wealthy life empty. Throughout his rise to success and ennui the common thread in his life is his love for a woman named Andrea Crammond, whom he reluctantly has to share with her other lover, a distant Frenchman.
Across these three narratives we begin to grasp what the bridge could be, explore the reasons Alex is there and discover the significance of both The Barbarian and the life that John Orr has lived.
What makes The Bridge so great is the inventiveness of Bank’s narratives. Each of his books is a unique riot of imagination and The Bridge is funny, poignant and awe-inspiring, sometimes all at once on one page.
For those of us who love The Culture novels The Bridge also gives us a hint of Banks’ famed space opera series years before Consider Phlebas was written, with hints of an interstellar civilization and advanced technologies sneaking into one of the narrative threads. If you’re as obsessed with The Culture as I am this glimpse of the seed that would grow into ten of the best novels in SF is tasty indeed.
It’s totally heady stuff, and I was shamelessly addicted, pawing over pages late at night, my eyes bleary with fatigue, ignoring my partner, my cat and any food unable to be eaten with one hand.
For some readers the founding premise of the novel may seem trite. For me however, the brilliance of the story and Bank's regular volcanic eruptions of narrative inventiveness massively overshadow the slightly clichéd premise beneath it all.
Why? Because this novel utilizes a pretty cheesy central plot device – If you can look past this cliched premise you will find yourself immersed in one of the best books I've read in the last decade.
If you've read any Banks you'll know that he was as comfortable with literary fiction as he was with Science Fiction, writing many books in both genres during his career. The Bridge falls into the litfic section of his output, but contains enough weird and speculative elements to appeal to those (like me) whose tastes tend towards genre.
The story is split three ways.
The first character, Alex, wakes on a bridge. However, this is no ordinary bridge. This bridge is a world, a vast, many-levelled structure that spans a seemingly endless sea, stretching off into infinity in either direction, an entire civilization existing within its steel stanchions and concrete buttresses.
Alex lives in this strange world, unsure how he came to be there exploring his new home and meeting with a psychiatrist to discuss his disturbing dreams. In particular he is enduring a series of sometimes hilarious, sometimes horrifying nightmares where he is making his way across a strange and magical world as The Barbarian- a sword-swinging Scottish-brogue wielding warrior who is the second major character in the narrative.
While Alex explores his own mind and his environs we also follow the life of a young man, James Orr, who is making his way in our world (There are some parallels with Banks' character Adrian Cubbish in Transition, although Adrian is a bit more of a chancer than James).
James finds success, with all its trappings, but finds his wealthy life empty. Throughout his rise to success and ennui the common thread in his life is his love for a woman named Andrea Crammond, whom he reluctantly has to share with her other lover, a distant Frenchman.
Across these three narratives we begin to grasp what the bridge could be, explore the reasons Alex is there and discover the significance of both The Barbarian and the life that John Orr has lived.
What makes The Bridge so great is the inventiveness of Bank’s narratives. Each of his books is a unique riot of imagination and The Bridge is funny, poignant and awe-inspiring, sometimes all at once on one page.
For those of us who love The Culture novels The Bridge also gives us a hint of Banks’ famed space opera series years before Consider Phlebas was written, with hints of an interstellar civilization and advanced technologies sneaking into one of the narrative threads. If you’re as obsessed with The Culture as I am this glimpse of the seed that would grow into ten of the best novels in SF is tasty indeed.
It’s totally heady stuff, and I was shamelessly addicted, pawing over pages late at night, my eyes bleary with fatigue, ignoring my partner, my cat and any food unable to be eaten with one hand.
For some readers the founding premise of the novel may seem trite. For me however, the brilliance of the story and Bank's regular volcanic eruptions of narrative inventiveness massively overshadow the slightly clichéd premise beneath it all.
Want to read
July 17, 2023I was watching Grey's Anatomy, Season 13, Episode 4. At 35 minutes in, Owen Hunt was lying in bed and reading a book. I have paused this scene and kept going backwards and forwards - trying to figure out what book he was reading.
And now - half an hour later - here I am, knowing the book and adding it to my TBR pile. I may never get to it, but the satisfaction of actually finding this book is too big!
It makes me realise - we spend so much time choosing books in today's fast world. And sometimes, when a book finds us, it is a miraculous moment, and I want to cherish this moment forever!
And now - half an hour later - here I am, knowing the book and adding it to my TBR pile. I may never get to it, but the satisfaction of actually finding this book is too big!
It makes me realise - we spend so much time choosing books in today's fast world. And sometimes, when a book finds us, it is a miraculous moment, and I want to cherish this moment forever!
November 21, 2008
Banks apparently thinks this is his best novel, and I agree. A very fine interleaving of dream and reality, without making the connections overly clear. Kafka meets the Wizard of Oz.
January 25, 2024
This review contains a mild spoiler. I don't know if you can call it a spoiler, because the Amazon book description as well as the Publishers Weekly review both give it away. I think that's a crying shame, although it's not really a spoiler that would take a lot of brain cells to figure out on your own. Anyway, I wouldn't mention it in my review if it weren't a key reason why I disliked the novel. Are you ready? Here it is:
It's all a dream.
Sigh. This book was written 25 years ago, but even then the "it was all a dream" scenario wasn't really all that fresh or interesting, and it takes a heckuva a lot of talent to pull it off without getting readers to feel like they've wasted their time. After all, absolutely anything can happen in dreams, and so it's never really a surprise when anything does. Say goodbye to plot, conflict, tension, drama, or any of the other structural bits and pieces that authors use to guide their storytelling. The most you can do with "it was all a dream" is connect it in some way to reality and hope that the bridge is meaningful or profound in some way.
The metaphor of the bridge is a pretty hefty one here. Suffering from amnesia, our narrator is fished from the waters around a bridge. This is no ordinary bridge. It's so large that it seems to have no beginning or ending, and an entire civilization lives among its beams and girders. This is, in fact, a really cool idea and worth exploring. Meanwhile, our narrator is asked by his therapist to provide him with examples of his nightly dreams. Since he doesn't remember his dreams, he makes them up. At first. This is also a pretty interesting concept, and the narrator's dreams -- both real and fake -- are pretty fascinating stuff.
But it's really all just a fictional gumbo. The narrative voice slips and slides for no reason other than to increase the disorienting effect of the dreamscape. Different stories -- including one about a warrior and his smart-mouthed familiar -- gain and lose prominence as the book goes on. The narrator, inexplicably, makes it off of the bridge and into a city that appears to be at war. Then he comes back. Then there's a desert. Back and forth. Up and down. There's no consistency to any of it, but that's because it's a dream, you see.
The thing is, no one likes to be told about your dreams. It doesn't matter how cool your dream is to you, or even what cool ideas there are in it, if you start to explain your dream to someone and it lasts longer than a minute, they'll start getting that glazed look in their eyes. I felt the exact same way about this book. Once it became apparent that this was all just some kind of coma-dream, it developed a hollow, very aimless feeling, and I ended up wishing it were over sooner.
Banks does include a description of the narrator's life when he was awake, and it's actually kind of impressive how well he conveys an entire life with such economy of language. You speed through his childhood and school years and well into his adulthood, marking his successes and failures and even the size of his bald spot. Much of his life centers around an unconventional relationship with a woman. But, even though it's nifty how slickly Banks condenses this man's personality and life into such a small space, the guy and his history aren't especially compelling. Even the kinda-sorta open relationship that he has feels just as hollow and aimless as the dream world he spends most of the book inhabiting. And no, it's pretty clear that that isn't the point of the book.
While it was probably a ton of fun to write and while there are elements here and there that are imaginative and stimulating, the whole experience is ultimately as unsatisfying as trying to remember the details of your own dreams an hour after waking. It's ultimately unsuccessful, and you end up wondering why you're even bothering.
It's all a dream.
Sigh. This book was written 25 years ago, but even then the "it was all a dream" scenario wasn't really all that fresh or interesting, and it takes a heckuva a lot of talent to pull it off without getting readers to feel like they've wasted their time. After all, absolutely anything can happen in dreams, and so it's never really a surprise when anything does. Say goodbye to plot, conflict, tension, drama, or any of the other structural bits and pieces that authors use to guide their storytelling. The most you can do with "it was all a dream" is connect it in some way to reality and hope that the bridge is meaningful or profound in some way.
The metaphor of the bridge is a pretty hefty one here. Suffering from amnesia, our narrator is fished from the waters around a bridge. This is no ordinary bridge. It's so large that it seems to have no beginning or ending, and an entire civilization lives among its beams and girders. This is, in fact, a really cool idea and worth exploring. Meanwhile, our narrator is asked by his therapist to provide him with examples of his nightly dreams. Since he doesn't remember his dreams, he makes them up. At first. This is also a pretty interesting concept, and the narrator's dreams -- both real and fake -- are pretty fascinating stuff.
But it's really all just a fictional gumbo. The narrative voice slips and slides for no reason other than to increase the disorienting effect of the dreamscape. Different stories -- including one about a warrior and his smart-mouthed familiar -- gain and lose prominence as the book goes on. The narrator, inexplicably, makes it off of the bridge and into a city that appears to be at war. Then he comes back. Then there's a desert. Back and forth. Up and down. There's no consistency to any of it, but that's because it's a dream, you see.
The thing is, no one likes to be told about your dreams. It doesn't matter how cool your dream is to you, or even what cool ideas there are in it, if you start to explain your dream to someone and it lasts longer than a minute, they'll start getting that glazed look in their eyes. I felt the exact same way about this book. Once it became apparent that this was all just some kind of coma-dream, it developed a hollow, very aimless feeling, and I ended up wishing it were over sooner.
Banks does include a description of the narrator's life when he was awake, and it's actually kind of impressive how well he conveys an entire life with such economy of language. You speed through his childhood and school years and well into his adulthood, marking his successes and failures and even the size of his bald spot. Much of his life centers around an unconventional relationship with a woman. But, even though it's nifty how slickly Banks condenses this man's personality and life into such a small space, the guy and his history aren't especially compelling. Even the kinda-sorta open relationship that he has feels just as hollow and aimless as the dream world he spends most of the book inhabiting. And no, it's pretty clear that that isn't the point of the book.
While it was probably a ton of fun to write and while there are elements here and there that are imaginative and stimulating, the whole experience is ultimately as unsatisfying as trying to remember the details of your own dreams an hour after waking. It's ultimately unsuccessful, and you end up wondering why you're even bothering.
October 18, 2017
Con Banks se cumple una máxima: nunca escribe dos veces la misma historia. Y esto no es nada sencillo, ya que en un momento u otro todos los escritores caen en el autoplagio.
La historia es apasionante. John Orr, nuestro protagonista, vive en una ciudad que no es tal. Se trata de un puente de unas dimensiones enormes en el que hay trenes, tranvías, ciudades, aviones que sobrevuelan el puente sin razón aparente, dirigibles... y todo dentro del puente. John sufre amnesia y visita periódicamente la consulta de un doctor al que le cuenta sus sueños como terapia, sueños que son importantes para la historia ya que son otro protagonista más. Pero John está intrigado por este puente, pregunta y pregunta pero nadie sabe o quiere responderle. Intenta buscar la Biblioteca para obtener respuestas, pero parece que nadie sabe donde se encuentra. Parece que John se encuentra perdido, hasta que conoce a una joven... Y es que esta es una historia de amor.
Banks escribe muy bien y nunca decepciona, sabe narrar y sorprender con cada uno de sus libros. Es una pena que únicamente sea conocido por los amantes de la ciencia ficción y la fantasía.
La historia es apasionante. John Orr, nuestro protagonista, vive en una ciudad que no es tal. Se trata de un puente de unas dimensiones enormes en el que hay trenes, tranvías, ciudades, aviones que sobrevuelan el puente sin razón aparente, dirigibles... y todo dentro del puente. John sufre amnesia y visita periódicamente la consulta de un doctor al que le cuenta sus sueños como terapia, sueños que son importantes para la historia ya que son otro protagonista más. Pero John está intrigado por este puente, pregunta y pregunta pero nadie sabe o quiere responderle. Intenta buscar la Biblioteca para obtener respuestas, pero parece que nadie sabe donde se encuentra. Parece que John se encuentra perdido, hasta que conoce a una joven... Y es que esta es una historia de amor.
Banks escribe muy bien y nunca decepciona, sabe narrar y sorprender con cada uno de sus libros. Es una pena que únicamente sea conocido por los amantes de la ciencia ficción y la fantasía.
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February 12, 2024O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
(E.A.Poe)
If this book could be read as a response to Poe's poem, then Banks is telling us that yes, this is all just a dream. And we must not forget the fragility and fleetingness of dream life, and we must ask ourselves if anything we dream has any lasting or real effect. But dreams are delicate and vulnerable, so we must tread softly while dreaming.
As Iain Banks ("conventional" mainstream novels) or Iain M Banks (SciFi Space Opera - "The Culture Universe"), this Scott writer always surprises me.
According to Freud, dreams are the image of an unfulfilled wish or a repressed impulse.
When night falls and we close our eyes, we slip into the fog of the subconscious and move on to another life, sometimes richer than the one we accept as real or true. Dreams are born from the fire of the life we live awake, triggering repressed unconscious desires with their limited connections or revealing unresolved conflicts, sometimes incoherently but sometimes clearly and cleanly.
Iain Banks was probably dreaming deeply, while awake, and "The Bridge" is the result of that dream. A dystopian dream with dreams inside dreams, full of imagination and symbolism while strongly anchored to the reality of common life. It is also a story floating between life and death but we don't realize it until we reach the last third of the book, despite the several hints we can notice that make us wonder while we progress.
The story unfolds in that nebulous region in the upper layers of dreams just before we wake up and lose the fragile Ariadne thread that connects our dreams to reality, where the trinity of the protagonist’s psyche (one bleak and political, other laid-back and casual and an explosive primal barbarian), together they feel like a whole, realistic person, trying to complete tasks, impossible to accomplish because of their titanic nature but especially because he is hindered at every step by the sinister and blinding bureaucracy in which he finds himself ensnared by his own misrecognized reluctance to discover the truth about himself and his situation; it's as if Josef K, the character from Kafka's "The Trial," has been thrust into a bizarre steampunk dream.
The story is told with bending reality, creative enthusiasm and inventiveness full of symbolic imagery but with a lot of humour too. The references to the music of the late 70s and early 80s are amusing (Chrissy Hind, Annie Lenox, Deep Purple, etc...); the ragings against the Thatcher/Reagan electoral victory from an independentist with a socialist penchant set the Utopia dream on "marche"; the symbolism cuts deep throughout the story, where we search for a mythical library as a key for Life and its meaning; we witness warplanes leaving braille messages in the sky; and we are offered a redefinition of an "open relationship" (not for all of us, I'm sure).
Some sections were hard for me; as I was born a non-English speaker, where Banks made use of a tick Scottt dialect I had to slow down to "translate" what I was reading, like: Got bak doon tae whare Karen wiz waiting in the oarry boat, aw tall dark and ugly an still wi his erms crossd an lookin ded hotty an dissdanefool. ?????????????????
The bridge itself (inspired by the "Forth Bridge" near Edinburgh) described in the book is a fantastic creation of one of the wildest imaginations I have ever encountered in literature; a structure without end or beginning inhabited by billions organized in a mysterious class system, with a hidden history, secrets and mysteries and dead ends worthy of the most delirious conceptions of Borges. A "world" with infinite levels and corridors full of private clubs, furnished elevators the size of rooms, luxurious apartments overlooking an endless sea, without beaches.
Its description is so elaborate that when reading it we can see the images projected by the words as if we were reading a graphic novel. I found the setting the most interesting feature of the book.
This book in itself, if we accept the title literally, is a "bridge" to "cross" as we cross life; to get to "the other side" and come back to try to understand love, death and the purpose of being.
To me, in literary terms, this novel is a masterpiece. Unfortunately, Iain Banks died too damn soon. But he left us many books, and many dreams for all of us to share and profit from, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he were remembered most for this complex, alluring dream he called The Bridge.
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
(Langston Hughes)
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
(E.A.Poe)
If this book could be read as a response to Poe's poem, then Banks is telling us that yes, this is all just a dream. And we must not forget the fragility and fleetingness of dream life, and we must ask ourselves if anything we dream has any lasting or real effect. But dreams are delicate and vulnerable, so we must tread softly while dreaming.
As Iain Banks ("conventional" mainstream novels) or Iain M Banks (SciFi Space Opera - "The Culture Universe"), this Scott writer always surprises me.
According to Freud, dreams are the image of an unfulfilled wish or a repressed impulse.
When night falls and we close our eyes, we slip into the fog of the subconscious and move on to another life, sometimes richer than the one we accept as real or true. Dreams are born from the fire of the life we live awake, triggering repressed unconscious desires with their limited connections or revealing unresolved conflicts, sometimes incoherently but sometimes clearly and cleanly.
Iain Banks was probably dreaming deeply, while awake, and "The Bridge" is the result of that dream. A dystopian dream with dreams inside dreams, full of imagination and symbolism while strongly anchored to the reality of common life. It is also a story floating between life and death but we don't realize it until we reach the last third of the book, despite the several hints we can notice that make us wonder while we progress.
The story unfolds in that nebulous region in the upper layers of dreams just before we wake up and lose the fragile Ariadne thread that connects our dreams to reality, where the trinity of the protagonist’s psyche (one bleak and political, other laid-back and casual and an explosive primal barbarian), together they feel like a whole, realistic person, trying to complete tasks, impossible to accomplish because of their titanic nature but especially because he is hindered at every step by the sinister and blinding bureaucracy in which he finds himself ensnared by his own misrecognized reluctance to discover the truth about himself and his situation; it's as if Josef K, the character from Kafka's "The Trial," has been thrust into a bizarre steampunk dream.
The story is told with bending reality, creative enthusiasm and inventiveness full of symbolic imagery but with a lot of humour too. The references to the music of the late 70s and early 80s are amusing (Chrissy Hind, Annie Lenox, Deep Purple, etc...); the ragings against the Thatcher/Reagan electoral victory from an independentist with a socialist penchant set the Utopia dream on "marche"; the symbolism cuts deep throughout the story, where we search for a mythical library as a key for Life and its meaning; we witness warplanes leaving braille messages in the sky; and we are offered a redefinition of an "open relationship" (not for all of us, I'm sure).
Some sections were hard for me; as I was born a non-English speaker, where Banks made use of a tick Scottt dialect I had to slow down to "translate" what I was reading, like: Got bak doon tae whare Karen wiz waiting in the oarry boat, aw tall dark and ugly an still wi his erms crossd an lookin ded hotty an dissdanefool. ?????????????????
The bridge itself (inspired by the "Forth Bridge" near Edinburgh) described in the book is a fantastic creation of one of the wildest imaginations I have ever encountered in literature; a structure without end or beginning inhabited by billions organized in a mysterious class system, with a hidden history, secrets and mysteries and dead ends worthy of the most delirious conceptions of Borges. A "world" with infinite levels and corridors full of private clubs, furnished elevators the size of rooms, luxurious apartments overlooking an endless sea, without beaches.
Its description is so elaborate that when reading it we can see the images projected by the words as if we were reading a graphic novel. I found the setting the most interesting feature of the book.
This book in itself, if we accept the title literally, is a "bridge" to "cross" as we cross life; to get to "the other side" and come back to try to understand love, death and the purpose of being.
To me, in literary terms, this novel is a masterpiece. Unfortunately, Iain Banks died too damn soon. But he left us many books, and many dreams for all of us to share and profit from, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he were remembered most for this complex, alluring dream he called The Bridge.
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
(Langston Hughes)
March 8, 2008
I love bridges, I spent much of my childhood designing them and building models. I love pictures and photographs of, and books about bridges, and I love the engineering aspects. I sit on bridges, under bridges, and looking at bridges, and feel complete. I love the Forth Bridge in Scotland, from when I first saw it on The 39 Steps (Hitchcock) to when my Dad took me up there when I was 10. And I like Iain Banks who was brought up on the Fife side of the Forth Bridge. So when I read this knockout fantasy set within the girders of the Forth Bridge, a Bridge become a universe, you will not wonder why I give it 5 stars. There is a neat parable called he Bridge by Kafka, too. And Annie Lennox has something to do with it.
January 22, 2025
“The scene whitens, holes appear in it; a film burning through (fire!) trapped in the gate (jaguar in the gate?); stopped, the scene melts, the seen scene disintegrates (see the seen scene disintegrate); nothing stands too-close enquiry. White screen left.”
I read Anna Kavan’s Ice, which I loved, and The Bridge by Iain Banks was recommended as another example of slipstream. I found this novel quite confusing, but unbelievably interesting.
“No, I'm not him. I'm just watching him. Just a man I met, somebody I used to know. I think I met him again, later. That comes later. All in good time.
I'm asleep now, but…well, I'm asleep now. That's enough.
No, I don't know where I am.
No, I don't know who I am.
Yes of course I know it's all a dream.
Isn't everything?”
I read Anna Kavan’s Ice, which I loved, and The Bridge by Iain Banks was recommended as another example of slipstream. I found this novel quite confusing, but unbelievably interesting.
“No, I'm not him. I'm just watching him. Just a man I met, somebody I used to know. I think I met him again, later. That comes later. All in good time.
I'm asleep now, but…well, I'm asleep now. That's enough.
No, I don't know where I am.
No, I don't know who I am.
Yes of course I know it's all a dream.
Isn't everything?”
June 26, 2013
What the hell this is so boring and aimless, and just not very well crafted either. I have to return to Murakami's rule from 1Q84: if the reader hasn't seen something before, you should take extra time to describe it.
And I knew it. I knew if I even caught a sniff of criticism of this book they would call it 'Kafka-esque', everyone's favourite shorthand for weird and depressing*. People praise Murakami for his true understanding of Kafka, and I have to praise him too because I don't get Kafka, but I have a strong inkling for what someone is going to call Kafka-esque, which often only tells me that the critic is reminded of Kafka, and not necessarily that the writing has any qualities of Kafka. Incidentally, this also feels like the depths of Banks' understanding of Kafka. Kafka.
Okay, so this is a book about psychology and an in-depth exploration of our relationships, but first and foremost, it may come as a surprise that it's actually about a fucking bridge. And if you go 'I got in the lift, I went to the building' where is the lift? The building, in relation to the bridge? Alongside it? Does it occlude the passage along the bridge? Then your character goes beneath the bridge and starts cutting about**. I didn't even know what the top of the bridge looked like! Now you're underneath it? What's there? I am given next to no tools to visualise this bridge, the buildings etc.
If you're going to build a weird world, well... build it. If you have a message about relationships, don't expect to wow me with psychoanalysis and literary quality before you have a plot, characters and- oh god!- a setting.
Go home literature, you're drunk.
*I forgot Beckett, too. Was it weird and depressing? Yeah. Didyageddit? No. Beckett!
**Scottish 'walking about'
And I knew it. I knew if I even caught a sniff of criticism of this book they would call it 'Kafka-esque', everyone's favourite shorthand for weird and depressing*. People praise Murakami for his true understanding of Kafka, and I have to praise him too because I don't get Kafka, but I have a strong inkling for what someone is going to call Kafka-esque, which often only tells me that the critic is reminded of Kafka, and not necessarily that the writing has any qualities of Kafka. Incidentally, this also feels like the depths of Banks' understanding of Kafka. Kafka.
Okay, so this is a book about psychology and an in-depth exploration of our relationships, but first and foremost, it may come as a surprise that it's actually about a fucking bridge. And if you go 'I got in the lift, I went to the building' where is the lift? The building, in relation to the bridge? Alongside it? Does it occlude the passage along the bridge? Then your character goes beneath the bridge and starts cutting about**. I didn't even know what the top of the bridge looked like! Now you're underneath it? What's there? I am given next to no tools to visualise this bridge, the buildings etc.
If you're going to build a weird world, well... build it. If you have a message about relationships, don't expect to wow me with psychoanalysis and literary quality before you have a plot, characters and- oh god!- a setting.
Go home literature, you're drunk.
*I forgot Beckett, too. Was it weird and depressing? Yeah. Didyageddit? No. Beckett!
**Scottish 'walking about'
November 14, 2020
A curious, unsettling and mesmeric journey through the mind of a man lying comatose in hospital after a terrible accident. I was particularly intrigued and amused by the man's dreams within dreams (which at least conceptually brought to mind the film Inception) and the lengths he went to in order to fabricate them to appease his psychologist. There are likely many deeper meanings and allusions at work here, which I think are likely quite personal and only really meaningful to Banks himself. Yet it's fascinating to get a glimpse of the dreams playing inside the man's mind as he struggles to regain his identity while cast about by the whims of his subconscious.
February 7, 2009
Considering my affection for Banks, it's remarkable how this book was about as enjoyable as a two-by-four across the forehead. I found it tedious and depressing.
October 9, 2014
When I first read The Bridge in my late teens, it had a huge impact on me. I'd never really read anything quite like it before: the blending of social realism and the science-fiction/fantasy world of 'The Bridge' itself. Returning to it nearly twenty years later, I found it an enjoyable enough read, but couldn't help noticing its flaws. It isn't either quite as original or as clever as I had remembered it.
At the risk of a very minor spoiler (I think it's reasonably apparent to anyone who reads the first page properly), the book tells two stories: One, the story of John Orr, a man who washes up with no idea who he is or how he got there, at the foot of a quite surreal civilisation living on a phantasmagorically huge bridge. The other, the story of an un-named man (though I have read that you can work out that he's called Alex Lennox from the diagrams of the Bridge in the book and his surname, at least, is corroborated by a reference to the lead-singer of the Eurythmics) from a working class Glasgwegian background who arrives at Edinburgh University in the late 1960s, falls in love with the upper-class Andrea Cramond, has a rather unconventional menage-a-trois relationship with her over the following eighteen years, while building up a successful engineering firm, all the while feeling an underlying discomfort that he is somehow betraying his working class roots. The two characters are, of course, the same person. The 'Bridge' sections play out as he lies in a hospital bed in a coma, following a traffic accident. Part of the fun comes from spotting how elements of the fantasy world connect back to his own life story (the first time I read it, I remember reaching the end and immediately beginning again and getting rather more out of it second time around). The horseman he meets at the beginning of the novel is clearly meant to stand in for Andrea's other lover, Abberlaine Arrol, the woman he seduces on The Bridge, is an imperfect facsimile of Andrea, and in the sequences later in the book where he leaves the Bridge and goes out and finds himself in a war-torn wasteland beyond, there appears to be a kind of metaphor for the way that his adult life began to go off the rails.
I don't know if I'm unusual in having a number of long-running narrative fictions floating about in my head (some of which I have been toying with since I was twelve years old), worlds I can easily enough float into when on a long train journey, or even just walking home from work, but reading this, I couldn't help thinking that it was in part about how what we imagine reflects back on our own life stories. John Orr's world can't help but be constructed from the fragments of Alex Lennox's life. Even when he's imagining living on the vast science-fiction world of the Bridge, that world still ends up echoing the real world from which he has been cut off.
So why wasn't I quite so impressed with it second time around? Well perhaps in part it's just that I've since realised it's not nearly as original as I thought at the time. Having since read Haruki Murakami, for example, I realise that there are others who can meld the real and the fantastical and , in some ways, do so to more interesting effect. And I don't know quite how I ploughed through the awful (though thankfully short) phonetic-Scots sections about a barbarian 'swordsman' and his familiar which didn't feel like they belonged in the same book. While the book does a very good job of portraying its central character, I couldn't help thinking that just about everyone else seemed very sketchily drawn. I never really understood what it was that drew him to Andrea, for example, because I never really got much of a sense of who Andrea actually was. And there were times when some of 'The Bridge' sequences felt like reading accounts of other peoples' dreams.
But I don't want to sound too negative. If the book doesn't mean quite so much to me at 36 as it did at 18, perhaps the story of a man arriving in Edinburgh at 18 was always going to appeal to me more then than now. There's much to recommend in it: there's a lyricism to his description of Lennox's early years, and there are many great one liners – I particularly liked Lennox's drunken rant about the 1984 US Presidential election which he ends by saying “Why don't I get a vote?”, to which his friend replies “No annihilation without representation, eh?” There are Easter-eggs (for want of a better term) for those who go looking for them too. Abberlaine Arrol's surname is a reference to the man who designed the Forth Rail Bridge, and the fact that the main character's name is Alex may just be an intertextual joke, as that was the name of Duncan Thaw's son in Lanark – a book which Iain Banks admitted was a strong influence. There are almost certainly many more that passed me by – I suspect the fraudulent Bridge psychiatrist Joyce might be a reference to James, but its relevance (as someone who's never so much as attempted Ulysses) passed me by. Worth revisiting, even if you can't stand in the same river twice.
[I'm not changing the 5 star rating. That's what I thought at the time. And I'd still give it four]
At the risk of a very minor spoiler (I think it's reasonably apparent to anyone who reads the first page properly), the book tells two stories: One, the story of John Orr, a man who washes up with no idea who he is or how he got there, at the foot of a quite surreal civilisation living on a phantasmagorically huge bridge. The other, the story of an un-named man (though I have read that you can work out that he's called Alex Lennox from the diagrams of the Bridge in the book and his surname, at least, is corroborated by a reference to the lead-singer of the Eurythmics) from a working class Glasgwegian background who arrives at Edinburgh University in the late 1960s, falls in love with the upper-class Andrea Cramond, has a rather unconventional menage-a-trois relationship with her over the following eighteen years, while building up a successful engineering firm, all the while feeling an underlying discomfort that he is somehow betraying his working class roots. The two characters are, of course, the same person. The 'Bridge' sections play out as he lies in a hospital bed in a coma, following a traffic accident. Part of the fun comes from spotting how elements of the fantasy world connect back to his own life story (the first time I read it, I remember reaching the end and immediately beginning again and getting rather more out of it second time around). The horseman he meets at the beginning of the novel is clearly meant to stand in for Andrea's other lover, Abberlaine Arrol, the woman he seduces on The Bridge, is an imperfect facsimile of Andrea, and in the sequences later in the book where he leaves the Bridge and goes out and finds himself in a war-torn wasteland beyond, there appears to be a kind of metaphor for the way that his adult life began to go off the rails.
I don't know if I'm unusual in having a number of long-running narrative fictions floating about in my head (some of which I have been toying with since I was twelve years old), worlds I can easily enough float into when on a long train journey, or even just walking home from work, but reading this, I couldn't help thinking that it was in part about how what we imagine reflects back on our own life stories. John Orr's world can't help but be constructed from the fragments of Alex Lennox's life. Even when he's imagining living on the vast science-fiction world of the Bridge, that world still ends up echoing the real world from which he has been cut off.
So why wasn't I quite so impressed with it second time around? Well perhaps in part it's just that I've since realised it's not nearly as original as I thought at the time. Having since read Haruki Murakami, for example, I realise that there are others who can meld the real and the fantastical and , in some ways, do so to more interesting effect. And I don't know quite how I ploughed through the awful (though thankfully short) phonetic-Scots sections about a barbarian 'swordsman' and his familiar which didn't feel like they belonged in the same book. While the book does a very good job of portraying its central character, I couldn't help thinking that just about everyone else seemed very sketchily drawn. I never really understood what it was that drew him to Andrea, for example, because I never really got much of a sense of who Andrea actually was. And there were times when some of 'The Bridge' sequences felt like reading accounts of other peoples' dreams.
But I don't want to sound too negative. If the book doesn't mean quite so much to me at 36 as it did at 18, perhaps the story of a man arriving in Edinburgh at 18 was always going to appeal to me more then than now. There's much to recommend in it: there's a lyricism to his description of Lennox's early years, and there are many great one liners – I particularly liked Lennox's drunken rant about the 1984 US Presidential election which he ends by saying “Why don't I get a vote?”, to which his friend replies “No annihilation without representation, eh?” There are Easter-eggs (for want of a better term) for those who go looking for them too. Abberlaine Arrol's surname is a reference to the man who designed the Forth Rail Bridge, and the fact that the main character's name is Alex may just be an intertextual joke, as that was the name of Duncan Thaw's son in Lanark – a book which Iain Banks admitted was a strong influence. There are almost certainly many more that passed me by – I suspect the fraudulent Bridge psychiatrist Joyce might be a reference to James, but its relevance (as someone who's never so much as attempted Ulysses) passed me by. Worth revisiting, even if you can't stand in the same river twice.
[I'm not changing the 5 star rating. That's what I thought at the time. And I'd still give it four]
October 6, 2021
The Bridge: Lucid dreams with a Scottish flair
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
Iain M. Banks is a versatile Scottish writer, equally skilled in far-future space opera (the CULTURE series), dark contemporary novels (The Crow Road, The Wasp Factory, Walking on Glass), and a host of novels in between. The Bridge is one of his earlier books, and the late author’s personal favorite according to an interview. It was also selected by David Pringle in his Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels. I’ve had it on the TBR list for about two decades, and finally got around to listening to it on audio.
The Bridge (1986) is narrated by Peter Kenny, the highly talented narrator of most of Banks’ novels, who is a master of British and Scottish accents and understands Banks’ ironic sense of humor. They are one of my favorite author/narrator collaborations, so I highly recommend any of their audiobooks.
The Bridge in particular is strongly Scottish in flavor. It has three protagonists:
John Orr, a John Doe with amnesia who wakes up in a strange world that consists of the Bridge, a self-contained society living along a seemingly endless bridge that is closely controlled by the authorities, which contains no overt connections to the “outside” world.
Alex, a successful mechanical engineer who has become jaded with his material success but failed relationship with his beloved Andrea. He has all the trapping of wealth, including expensive sports cars, high-end stereo equipment, a series of casual relationships, and partnership in his engineering firm. But Andrea has left him for a French lover, so he turns to alcohol and drugs to numb his misery.
The Barbarian, a Scottish swordsman of the past who lives by his sword, quick to kill or take what he wants, an embodiment of primal male aggressiveness without the restraints of civilization. Just like Bascule the Teller in Feersum Endjinn (1994), his parts are narrated in a very thick Scottish brogue, denoted with phonetic spelling.
Here’s a sample of The Barbarian, who is often hilariously outrageous and unapologetic:
“I luv the ded, this old baster sez to me when I wiz tryin to get some innfurmashin out ov him. You fukin old pervirt I sez, gettin a bit fed up by this time enyway, an slit his throate; ah asks you whare the fukin Sleeping Byootie woz, no whit kind of humpin you like.”
The story alternates between these three very different voices, and over time we come to understand their relationship. It’s hard to avoid spoilers if you read any reviews of the book, but the pleasures of the book lie in the unfolding of the story, so I won’t reveal anything here. The book is very nicely constructed, with the three main sections cleverly titled COMA (Metaphormosis), TRIASSIC (Metamorpheus), and EOCENE (Metamorphosis).
The central questions of the book are not which reality is “real”, but rather which “reality” is preferable. The story of Alex is a contemporary one of a jaded, selfish, and disaffected modern man, and his inability to maintain meaningful relationships. We get a detailed look at his blue-collar upbringing in Glasgow, studies at the University of Edinburgh, steady climb to success, and ultimate dissatisfaction. It’s a sad picture of the UK in the 1980s under Thatcherism, and includes plenty of pop-culture references to music, politics, the economy etc.
What makes The Bridge unique and mysterious are the two other narrators, John Orr and The Barbarian. John Orr has no idea how he ended up on the Bridge, and has many conversations with Dr. Joyce, his psychotherapist. Initially John tries hard to understand what happened, but his lack of progress leads to him being abandoned by his doctor, and he turns instead to exploring the self-contained world of the Bridge.
Is it all a dream? Which one is the real world? This would be fairly cliched territory if Banks were to simply wrap up the story with “then he woke up, and it was all a dream.” Instead, the narratives of John Orr and Alex are initially given equal weight but this shifts as the story progresses. Even as we realize how they are connected, it is not simply a matter of “waking up” to make the other threads go away. Instead, we are given an emotionally-honest exploration of their internal realities, with the ambiguous but concrete symbolism of the Bridge looming above, around, and throughout the story. Are each of us living on a Bridge, self-contained and unique, without recourse to escape? Doomed to wander from end to end, seeking meaning and meaningful relationships with others around us, never quite sure what it all means?
The Bridge could easily be described as Kafkaesque for its weird metaphorical mental landscapes, but it has a flavor all its own, and a very Scottish one at that. I think the narration by Peter Kenny really gives it that added flair, and the Coda felt very meaningful to me at least. It’s a book that will be interpreted differently by each reader, and some will find it ambiguous or disappointing, but like all of Banks’ books, I found it worth the time and effort.
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
Iain M. Banks is a versatile Scottish writer, equally skilled in far-future space opera (the CULTURE series), dark contemporary novels (The Crow Road, The Wasp Factory, Walking on Glass), and a host of novels in between. The Bridge is one of his earlier books, and the late author’s personal favorite according to an interview. It was also selected by David Pringle in his Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels. I’ve had it on the TBR list for about two decades, and finally got around to listening to it on audio.
The Bridge (1986) is narrated by Peter Kenny, the highly talented narrator of most of Banks’ novels, who is a master of British and Scottish accents and understands Banks’ ironic sense of humor. They are one of my favorite author/narrator collaborations, so I highly recommend any of their audiobooks.
The Bridge in particular is strongly Scottish in flavor. It has three protagonists:
John Orr, a John Doe with amnesia who wakes up in a strange world that consists of the Bridge, a self-contained society living along a seemingly endless bridge that is closely controlled by the authorities, which contains no overt connections to the “outside” world.
Alex, a successful mechanical engineer who has become jaded with his material success but failed relationship with his beloved Andrea. He has all the trapping of wealth, including expensive sports cars, high-end stereo equipment, a series of casual relationships, and partnership in his engineering firm. But Andrea has left him for a French lover, so he turns to alcohol and drugs to numb his misery.
The Barbarian, a Scottish swordsman of the past who lives by his sword, quick to kill or take what he wants, an embodiment of primal male aggressiveness without the restraints of civilization. Just like Bascule the Teller in Feersum Endjinn (1994), his parts are narrated in a very thick Scottish brogue, denoted with phonetic spelling.
Here’s a sample of The Barbarian, who is often hilariously outrageous and unapologetic:
“I luv the ded, this old baster sez to me when I wiz tryin to get some innfurmashin out ov him. You fukin old pervirt I sez, gettin a bit fed up by this time enyway, an slit his throate; ah asks you whare the fukin Sleeping Byootie woz, no whit kind of humpin you like.”
The story alternates between these three very different voices, and over time we come to understand their relationship. It’s hard to avoid spoilers if you read any reviews of the book, but the pleasures of the book lie in the unfolding of the story, so I won’t reveal anything here. The book is very nicely constructed, with the three main sections cleverly titled COMA (Metaphormosis), TRIASSIC (Metamorpheus), and EOCENE (Metamorphosis).
The central questions of the book are not which reality is “real”, but rather which “reality” is preferable. The story of Alex is a contemporary one of a jaded, selfish, and disaffected modern man, and his inability to maintain meaningful relationships. We get a detailed look at his blue-collar upbringing in Glasgow, studies at the University of Edinburgh, steady climb to success, and ultimate dissatisfaction. It’s a sad picture of the UK in the 1980s under Thatcherism, and includes plenty of pop-culture references to music, politics, the economy etc.
What makes The Bridge unique and mysterious are the two other narrators, John Orr and The Barbarian. John Orr has no idea how he ended up on the Bridge, and has many conversations with Dr. Joyce, his psychotherapist. Initially John tries hard to understand what happened, but his lack of progress leads to him being abandoned by his doctor, and he turns instead to exploring the self-contained world of the Bridge.
Is it all a dream? Which one is the real world? This would be fairly cliched territory if Banks were to simply wrap up the story with “then he woke up, and it was all a dream.” Instead, the narratives of John Orr and Alex are initially given equal weight but this shifts as the story progresses. Even as we realize how they are connected, it is not simply a matter of “waking up” to make the other threads go away. Instead, we are given an emotionally-honest exploration of their internal realities, with the ambiguous but concrete symbolism of the Bridge looming above, around, and throughout the story. Are each of us living on a Bridge, self-contained and unique, without recourse to escape? Doomed to wander from end to end, seeking meaning and meaningful relationships with others around us, never quite sure what it all means?
The Bridge could easily be described as Kafkaesque for its weird metaphorical mental landscapes, but it has a flavor all its own, and a very Scottish one at that. I think the narration by Peter Kenny really gives it that added flair, and the Coda felt very meaningful to me at least. It’s a book that will be interpreted differently by each reader, and some will find it ambiguous or disappointing, but like all of Banks’ books, I found it worth the time and effort.
May 10, 2024
Surprisingly, 3.5/5! Really really enjoyed some stuff in there, didn't feel like it came together that great. Way more thoughts to come, but after book club, which is in 1.5 hrs!
May 10, 2024
28th book for 2024.
I came in with pretty high expectations for this one—Banks apparently thought this was his best book—and perhaps unsurprisingly disappointed.
The novel consists of three independent stories: the loves and life of an unnamed Scottish engineer, that covers the 1970s and 1980s in Scotland; John Orr, who finds himself without memory on a bridge, that appears to be a mysterious self-contained city; and a barbarian with a strong Glasgow accent who does fantasy barbarian stuff and provides comic relief.
As always with Banks, the writing is enjoyable, but I never felt the stories came together in any interesting way. It's fairly obvious from the beginning that the Scottish engineer is in a coma, and that the other two stories are dream states. John Orr finds himself on a Bridge between the City (of Man?) and the Kingdom (of God?). I have read that the Orr represents the engineer's ego, and the barbarian the engineer's id, but I didn't find the argument particularly compelling, or if true, particularly insightful/interesting.
The end result where he just wakes up in the arms of his beloved and the rest is just a dream is disappointing and too sentimental.
Read as part of the Banks bookclub, here in Berlin.
3-stars.
I came in with pretty high expectations for this one—Banks apparently thought this was his best book—and perhaps unsurprisingly disappointed.
The novel consists of three independent stories: the loves and life of an unnamed Scottish engineer, that covers the 1970s and 1980s in Scotland; John Orr, who finds himself without memory on a bridge, that appears to be a mysterious self-contained city; and a barbarian with a strong Glasgow accent who does fantasy barbarian stuff and provides comic relief.
As always with Banks, the writing is enjoyable, but I never felt the stories came together in any interesting way. It's fairly obvious from the beginning that the Scottish engineer is in a coma, and that the other two stories are dream states. John Orr finds himself on a Bridge between the City (of Man?) and the Kingdom (of God?). I have read that the Orr represents the engineer's ego, and the barbarian the engineer's id, but I didn't find the argument particularly compelling, or if true, particularly insightful/interesting.
The end result where he just wakes up in the arms of his beloved and the rest is just a dream is disappointing and too sentimental.
Read as part of the Banks bookclub, here in Berlin.
3-stars.
February 15, 2013
Hypnagogic, mesmerising, hallucinatory: the melding of the real with the vanished, the imaginary, the may-never-have-been. A bridge becomes the whole architectonic world of a mind, and vice versa. As experiment in stretching a formal conceit to an aesthetic project, Bank's saran-wrap of metal over narrative succeeds grandly.
In the Bridge, the usual Banksian tropes plonk into Being: the requisite names which suggest familiarity but which maintain an air of oddity serve only to estrange, to make the quasi-real unreal; the preoccupation with war as fundus of the human heart, at root of all. Sappy love stories between people. Modern day Scotland. Amenesia as conventient vehicle to knit together and explain all the above.
Tightly written - or should I say welded, this is probably the Best "non M" Banks that Banks has done. For all its head-in-the-clouds freewheeling, the book doesn't lose its feet: the book is firmly undergirt by the monolithic structure of the bridge indeed, dominated in fact by it, and Bank's artistic enterprise succeeds because of it. Compelling and fun.
In the Bridge, the usual Banksian tropes plonk into Being: the requisite names which suggest familiarity but which maintain an air of oddity serve only to estrange, to make the quasi-real unreal; the preoccupation with war as fundus of the human heart, at root of all. Sappy love stories between people. Modern day Scotland. Amenesia as conventient vehicle to knit together and explain all the above.
Tightly written - or should I say welded, this is probably the Best "non M" Banks that Banks has done. For all its head-in-the-clouds freewheeling, the book doesn't lose its feet: the book is firmly undergirt by the monolithic structure of the bridge indeed, dominated in fact by it, and Bank's artistic enterprise succeeds because of it. Compelling and fun.
February 3, 2014
"Just one more thing." I nod at the bodies littering the ground like fallen leaves. "What happened here? What happened to all these people?"Like skywriting in Braille... the late Iain Banks' early novel The Bridge is hard to get a grip on. The comparisons that spring to my mind are mostly cinematic... think David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, or perhaps Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder.
He shrugs. "They didn't listen to their dreams," he says, then turns back to his task.
—pp.362-363
Feverish and multilayered, The Bridge is a challenging work, not easy to appreciate, or to synopsize. A man lies in a coma after a car crash in Scotland; an amnesiac tries to fit into the linear society he finds living on an apparently-endless bridge; a barbarian warrior battles sorcery while ridden by a magical familiar. This is Banks without the M., the initialless persona he used for his mimetic fiction, but the veil between fantasy and realism here is very thin. Most of The Bridge appears to be fabulation, in fact—the great Bridge itself is a setting worthy of China Miéville, and there are swathes of a swashbuckling sword-and-sorcery tale told in the barbarian's near-impenetrable dialect. It seems likely from the beginning that all of these narrators are the same person, but if so which one is the real man, and which ones the butterflies merely dreaming that they are men?
And did it really take me more than 300 pages to remember that "bridge" has more than one meaning?
"No annihilation without representation,"The Bridge seemed steeped in the UK's politics of the 1980s, and in that way more akin to fellow Scots author Alasdair Gray's work than other Banks novels. Elsewhere in his conversation with Stewart, for example, our narrator speculates on whether Scotland could ever have become an empire the way Rome did. His conclusion is that by the time the Scots became civilized themselves, they'd missed their chance—they were already too late to become world civilizers.
—Stewart, p.330
She laughed, shook her head. "Well, love is blind," she said.Despite its bizarre trappings, exotic digressions and flights of outright fancy, though, The Bridge seems to me at its heart to convey a simple message, one that's utterly mundane: that although love may be blind, it's also strong—it'll find a way to express itself even though the rest of the world may have gone mad.
"So they tell us," he sighed. "Can't see it myself."
—p.278
Ach, mebbe I've just gone a bit daft arter a hunnerd-and-fourty years wi'this wee bugger whisperin' on me showlder...
May 27, 2011
A fantastic experience that's clearly a dream yet the story is reminiscent of everything we all have to deal with in the real world every day.
A dream that's clearly the real world yet the story is too lovely to be real, and too painful not to be.
Dreams that are dreams within dreams that may hold meaning but it's hidden from me.
Read it. You may regret it. But you won't forget it.
A dream that's clearly the real world yet the story is too lovely to be real, and too painful not to be.
Dreams that are dreams within dreams that may hold meaning but it's hidden from me.
Read it. You may regret it. But you won't forget it.
May 26, 2024
Absolutely phenomenal. It is somehow surprising to me, though it shouldn't be, that Banks's literary fiction can be just as imaginative as his science fiction. There are so many ideas packed into such a short book, and the layers of symbolism and metaphor will undoubtedly make this a fun book to reread; I'm sure I missed a lot.
It takes a clichéd premise (we follow the dreams of a man as he lies comatose following a car accident) and executes it with such flair and finesse that the idea seems fresh and new again. The beating heart of the story is an unconventional love story that's both vivid and compelling.
I fell in love with Banks as an author of sci-fi, and now I'm falling in love all over again with his lit fic, fully cementing him as one of my favourite authors of all time.
It takes a clichéd premise (we follow the dreams of a man as he lies comatose following a car accident) and executes it with such flair and finesse that the idea seems fresh and new again. The beating heart of the story is an unconventional love story that's both vivid and compelling.
I fell in love with Banks as an author of sci-fi, and now I'm falling in love all over again with his lit fic, fully cementing him as one of my favourite authors of all time.
March 5, 2024
This story comes off like a mashup of Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka with a little dose of the universe in the graphic novels of Schuiten (cf. Les murailles de Samaris and others). It was not easy to follow, but there is a good payoff at the end when the various threads get woven together. I liked the "real world" sections because those pages really breathed. There was a Murakami-esque ending that left most of the narrative threads hanging, although it might be unfair to ask for closure in a dreamy novel such as this one.
May 15, 2013
I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who expects to find meaning, connection or even a direct plot. Except for what is obvious, there is not much going for the book, plot-wise. Man goes into coma. Man must come out of it. Everything else, in between, is engaging, yet deeply un-meaningful. People who want to analyse and interpret the world of dreams might just have a field day with this book. But someone more astute to practical reasoning might just not be. There is nothing - I feel - deeply psychological about this book. There is a dream world that the protagonist is stuck in and he only half-way suspects that it is a dream. Then there are dreams within the dream. Imagination, inspiration, certain factors you wouldn't think would be possible to have in a dream. In that area, I found the book deeply satisfying. The complex meaninglessness of the dream world for me, is riveting. We each go on with our lives half-suspecting it is a dream and we go on with our dreams, half-suspecting it is life. Only when the luxury of slipping from one state to another, day in and day out, is taken away from us - as is the case with the man in the coma - do we begin to really examine reality. Or even strive for it.
Funny in unexpected ways, deeply imaginative in some of the dream within dream subplots, and quite satisfactory in the way the real life of our protagonist is depicted, Ian Bank's The Bridge is, if I dare say it, quite avant garde.
March 31, 2011
This is the one that the literary circles like to applaud, the one that Melvyn Bragg spent half of a South Bank Show special talking about, at the expense of Iain M Banks obviously! Yet this is the book which perhaps melds the two Iains together the best, the contemporary chronicler of Scotland and the foibles and machinations of modern protagonists from Complicity to the Crowd Road, with the wild imagination and sex and gore and shock of the Culture novels.
Here is a mans life, lived and loved in modern Scotland, building a career, buying cars, history passing and times changing and commentary abounds. But then there is the juxtaposition, the Bridge, the fantasy world of the comma patient, a commentary on a life, a journey, a battle of the Id and Ego, dead ends, red herrings, strangeness, false hopes and allusions and illusions.
It is an absolute delight to read Iain Banks prose, whether in the real world, or the endlessly inventive and perplexing world of the bridge.
Here is a mans life, lived and loved in modern Scotland, building a career, buying cars, history passing and times changing and commentary abounds. But then there is the juxtaposition, the Bridge, the fantasy world of the comma patient, a commentary on a life, a journey, a battle of the Id and Ego, dead ends, red herrings, strangeness, false hopes and allusions and illusions.
It is an absolute delight to read Iain Banks prose, whether in the real world, or the endlessly inventive and perplexing world of the bridge.
February 19, 2010
This is, first and foremost, a love story. As a confessed Romantic, this is my favorite Iain M. Banks book. But it is much more than a love story, even if it is one that resonates very powerfully on me. It is also a vision on the wonders and depths of human fantasy, and how everyone of us holds the potential for wonder. In a way it is Whitman's quote given form:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
And I love Bridges, and have a special spot for the two Firth of Forth bridges.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
And I love Bridges, and have a special spot for the two Firth of Forth bridges.
May 10, 2024
This book started really strong for me, with a mysterious series of intriguing chapters where it’s not entirely clear what’s real and what isn’t. And it ended on a high note, with a beautiful chapter about the progression of a relationship over decades with an earnest, emotional payoff.
But much of the middle lost me, with a series of dream sequences that I couldn’t bring myself to care about, and much of the time it felt like Banks was focusing more on being clever than on crafting a story that the reader can connect to.
But much of the middle lost me, with a series of dream sequences that I couldn’t bring myself to care about, and much of the time it felt like Banks was focusing more on being clever than on crafting a story that the reader can connect to.
March 24, 2017
This isn't a review, it's a love letter. Sorry.
In the large and disparate family of Iain Banks novels this is the funny looking kid whom you're sure must be adopted. Yes, it has its daddy's eyes and a wicked grin, but it's... Different. It's not one of the truly creatively nasty ones (The Wasp Factory; Complicity). It's not one of the warm(ish)-hearted ones (The Crow Road; Whit; The Quarry). It's not one of the dark, bleak, mildly baffling ones (Canal Dreams; A Song of Stone), or a love story with complications (Stonemouth; Dead Air; The Steep Approach to Garbadale). It's not Banks-with-an-m, though a knife missile does put in an appearance at one point. It's something altogether stranger, and unmistakably Banks.
(Apologies to Walking On Glass, The Business, and Transition, I haven't forgotten you, honest. As to Espedair Street, well, we haven't yet been introduced. I look forward to making your acquaintance.)
Banks's other books are grounded more-or-less firmly in some kind of reality; this is not. The Bridge is an extended dream sequence...
STOP!
I know what you're going to say, and:
1/ That's not a spoiler, it's mentioned quite explicitly in the blurb.
2/ It's not some kind of wishy-washy, misty-eyed, hand-wavingly vague, delicately allusive, oh-look-at-me-I've-read-a-psychology-textbook dream sequence with lots of notional fog drifting about the place, and sudden and jarring transformations, but something much more solid and robust.
The Bridge is an extended dream sequence in which three main strands of narrative reflect and inform one another. It has the lightness of The Business (see, I told you I hadn't forgotten you), and a much larger dose of verbal dexterity. It is, to be frank, very, very funny with serious undercurrents. It's a puzzle-box, and one of the delights is unpacking it for yourself.
Now, why might you not enjoy it?
Well, and this made my heart sink when I encountered it, but one of the strands is written in the kind of bizarre phonetic spelling that stopped me from reading Feersum Enjinn. I got used to it. Do not skip these sections, they are genuinely hilarious. I wonder if this is where Pratchett got the Feegles from.
There is the whole dream thing to contend with, but I think I've covered that. It's not as if there's that much gratuitous weirdness.
There's a fair bit of sex, so if you're one of Bertie Wooster's aunts... Well, probably just Aunt Agatha, Aunt Dahlia would take it in her stride, don't you think? Probably has done in her time... You might want to look away. Mind you, if you have a problem with sex you'll probably want to steer clear of Banks altogether.
There's the fact that it's not pure fantasy: one of the strands, and hence about a third of the book, is memory, and set in 60s-80s Scotland (roughly). In fact it's not pure anything, which is perfectly fine by me, but may bother you.
Oh, and there's the possibility that you may be expecting something deep and chin-strokingly serious, in which case you won't like the surface glitter... did I mention that it's really very funny? I did? Oh good. That and that if you are the kind of person who drives themselves mad trying to figure out what each and every reference means then you'll need a padded cell by the end. It might even be worth it.
This leaves me with the ticklish problem of the K-word and, slightly less contentiously, the matter of the G-word. There are, in the bridge section itself, traces of Kafka, and shades of Gormenghast. Both are powerful spices used sparingly, and I doubt I'd have spotted it if I hadn't read Walking On Glass, but they are there. Don't expect heavy and paranoid.
Just to complete this game of Iain Banks bingo, and with due apologies to anyone on the wrong side of the Atlantic, where Transition is Banks-with-an-m, there may be a touch here of the conflict between realism and solipsism - don't ask me about that, I'm no philosopher.
Bingo!
In the large and disparate family of Iain Banks novels this is the funny looking kid whom you're sure must be adopted. Yes, it has its daddy's eyes and a wicked grin, but it's... Different. It's not one of the truly creatively nasty ones (The Wasp Factory; Complicity). It's not one of the warm(ish)-hearted ones (The Crow Road; Whit; The Quarry). It's not one of the dark, bleak, mildly baffling ones (Canal Dreams; A Song of Stone), or a love story with complications (Stonemouth; Dead Air; The Steep Approach to Garbadale). It's not Banks-with-an-m, though a knife missile does put in an appearance at one point. It's something altogether stranger, and unmistakably Banks.
(Apologies to Walking On Glass, The Business, and Transition, I haven't forgotten you, honest. As to Espedair Street, well, we haven't yet been introduced. I look forward to making your acquaintance.)
Banks's other books are grounded more-or-less firmly in some kind of reality; this is not. The Bridge is an extended dream sequence...
STOP!
I know what you're going to say, and:
1/ That's not a spoiler, it's mentioned quite explicitly in the blurb.
2/ It's not some kind of wishy-washy, misty-eyed, hand-wavingly vague, delicately allusive, oh-look-at-me-I've-read-a-psychology-textbook dream sequence with lots of notional fog drifting about the place, and sudden and jarring transformations, but something much more solid and robust.
The Bridge is an extended dream sequence in which three main strands of narrative reflect and inform one another. It has the lightness of The Business (see, I told you I hadn't forgotten you), and a much larger dose of verbal dexterity. It is, to be frank, very, very funny with serious undercurrents. It's a puzzle-box, and one of the delights is unpacking it for yourself.
Now, why might you not enjoy it?
Well, and this made my heart sink when I encountered it, but one of the strands is written in the kind of bizarre phonetic spelling that stopped me from reading Feersum Enjinn. I got used to it. Do not skip these sections, they are genuinely hilarious. I wonder if this is where Pratchett got the Feegles from.
There is the whole dream thing to contend with, but I think I've covered that. It's not as if there's that much gratuitous weirdness.
There's a fair bit of sex, so if you're one of Bertie Wooster's aunts... Well, probably just Aunt Agatha, Aunt Dahlia would take it in her stride, don't you think? Probably has done in her time... You might want to look away. Mind you, if you have a problem with sex you'll probably want to steer clear of Banks altogether.
There's the fact that it's not pure fantasy: one of the strands, and hence about a third of the book, is memory, and set in 60s-80s Scotland (roughly). In fact it's not pure anything, which is perfectly fine by me, but may bother you.
Oh, and there's the possibility that you may be expecting something deep and chin-strokingly serious, in which case you won't like the surface glitter... did I mention that it's really very funny? I did? Oh good. That and that if you are the kind of person who drives themselves mad trying to figure out what each and every reference means then you'll need a padded cell by the end. It might even be worth it.
This leaves me with the ticklish problem of the K-word and, slightly less contentiously, the matter of the G-word. There are, in the bridge section itself, traces of Kafka, and shades of Gormenghast. Both are powerful spices used sparingly, and I doubt I'd have spotted it if I hadn't read Walking On Glass, but they are there. Don't expect heavy and paranoid.
Just to complete this game of Iain Banks bingo, and with due apologies to anyone on the wrong side of the Atlantic, where Transition is Banks-with-an-m, there may be a touch here of the conflict between realism and solipsism - don't ask me about that, I'm no philosopher.
Bingo!
July 31, 2016
Wow. What a crazy, ambitious book. Definitely not the kind of book an author could write as a debut. It seems to me that there are a ton of books and films that spin off from this work, and it's indicative of Banks's wild and creative imagination that he was coming up with this kind of stuff before anyone else. I could find all sorts of elements of things to come: tinges of Inception, The Matrix, Alex Garland's The Coma, even the transcription of Scottish dialect that would turn up in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting several years later.
This was a tough book to get into, but I'm so glad I persevered. It became something enormous, something brilliant and breathtaking, like the giant structure of the bridge itself.
I still get a bit sentimental reading Iain Banks. I ration his books, and have been trying not read them all -- even more so since he died. Reading this one, I thought how sad it was that he died so young (59), but then I feel happy when I read sections of books like this from the 80s, and see evidence of his ebullience back then -- a quality which I don't think he ever lost. I really hope he lived his life like this quote, and had no regrets when he died:
Damn it I wanna do things! I want to travel the Trans-Siberian, go to India, stand on Ayers Rock, get sodden wet in Machupicchu! I want to surf! I will get a hang-glider; I want to go back to the Grand Canyon and get further than just the rim rock this time, I want to see the aurora borealis from Svalbard or Greenland, I want to see a total eclipse, I want to watch pyroclastic displays, I want to walk inside a lava tunnel, I want to see the earth from space, I want to drink chang in Ladakh, I want to cruise down the Amazon and up the Yangtze and walk the Great Wall; I want to visit Azania! I want to watch them push helicopters off the aircraft carriers again! I want to be in bed with three women at once!
And here's a quote we can probably all relate to:
No, I don't know where I am.
No, I don't know who I am.
Yes of course I know it's all a dream.
Isn't everything?
This was a tough book to get into, but I'm so glad I persevered. It became something enormous, something brilliant and breathtaking, like the giant structure of the bridge itself.
I still get a bit sentimental reading Iain Banks. I ration his books, and have been trying not read them all -- even more so since he died. Reading this one, I thought how sad it was that he died so young (59), but then I feel happy when I read sections of books like this from the 80s, and see evidence of his ebullience back then -- a quality which I don't think he ever lost. I really hope he lived his life like this quote, and had no regrets when he died:
Damn it I wanna do things! I want to travel the Trans-Siberian, go to India, stand on Ayers Rock, get sodden wet in Machupicchu! I want to surf! I will get a hang-glider; I want to go back to the Grand Canyon and get further than just the rim rock this time, I want to see the aurora borealis from Svalbard or Greenland, I want to see a total eclipse, I want to watch pyroclastic displays, I want to walk inside a lava tunnel, I want to see the earth from space, I want to drink chang in Ladakh, I want to cruise down the Amazon and up the Yangtze and walk the Great Wall; I want to visit Azania! I want to watch them push helicopters off the aircraft carriers again! I want to be in bed with three women at once!
And here's a quote we can probably all relate to:
No, I don't know where I am.
No, I don't know who I am.
Yes of course I know it's all a dream.
Isn't everything?
November 13, 2009
I'm an Iain Banks fan from way back, though sometimes I find myself thrashing around in his prose so violently that I abandon a book midway through. Banks writes science fiction (as "Iain M. Banks") and...other fiction. It would be wrong to call it mainstream or "straight" in any sense of the word. Banks's books are convoluted and rich and spiraling. They are infested with so much counterintuitive brilliance that I find myself being thrown from baffled boredom to pure delight within the span of a page. No one else writes like him.
Unfortunately, even Banks isn't always able to write like himself, and The Bridge inspires way more fatigue than joy. I wound up skimming the last 100 pages out of sheer disgust with the paperboard characters and self-involved plot twists. The book contains scenes of anarchic creativity, but they're surrounded by a lot of spaced-out time-wasting. I think the ending was supposed to be moving, but it feels unearned (though, to be fair, maybe if I'd read the book's last section with more attention its conclusion would have resonated more with me).
My favorite Banks book is Complicity, a twisted and deeply sick murder mystery that contains some scorching and hilarious sex scenes. His most famous novel is The Wasp Factory, which was too sadistic for me to get through. His SF work is deeply respected by fans of that genre; Feersum Endjinn is a good place to start.
Unfortunately, even Banks isn't always able to write like himself, and The Bridge inspires way more fatigue than joy. I wound up skimming the last 100 pages out of sheer disgust with the paperboard characters and self-involved plot twists. The book contains scenes of anarchic creativity, but they're surrounded by a lot of spaced-out time-wasting. I think the ending was supposed to be moving, but it feels unearned (though, to be fair, maybe if I'd read the book's last section with more attention its conclusion would have resonated more with me).
My favorite Banks book is Complicity, a twisted and deeply sick murder mystery that contains some scorching and hilarious sex scenes. His most famous novel is The Wasp Factory, which was too sadistic for me to get through. His SF work is deeply respected by fans of that genre; Feersum Endjinn is a good place to start.
December 2, 2016
Well good gosh golly dang.
I don't know if I want to spoil too much about the story here so I'll get this out of the way and say that you should probably read this book. It's just so... weird. And wonderful. And kinda in that slow plodding kind of book that I like but at the same time so full of little things and such a fast pace that it makes it hard not to like it. There's a bunch of different writing styles that come up at seemingly random that all manage to work their way into the plot and it's all just so wonderfully done.
I think that's about all I really want to say. Sure it might be a good idea to give more of a plot detail or talk about the prose or the dialogue but instead, I just think I won't. I can get why somebody might not like it, very easily so, but it dives right into the kinda shit that appeals to me, so check it out.
I don't know if I want to spoil too much about the story here so I'll get this out of the way and say that you should probably read this book. It's just so... weird. And wonderful. And kinda in that slow plodding kind of book that I like but at the same time so full of little things and such a fast pace that it makes it hard not to like it. There's a bunch of different writing styles that come up at seemingly random that all manage to work their way into the plot and it's all just so wonderfully done.
I think that's about all I really want to say. Sure it might be a good idea to give more of a plot detail or talk about the prose or the dialogue but instead, I just think I won't. I can get why somebody might not like it, very easily so, but it dives right into the kinda shit that appeals to me, so check it out.
May 4, 2014
Surrealistic, disturbing and funny by turns, The Bridge offers a window into the wandering mind of a man lying in a coma after a car accident. The scenes in the first half of the book, set in the world of the endless Bridge, read like some steampunk vision, but as the book continues it becomes a bit incoherent. I had the feeling I missed some important allusions. Why, for instance, are the sections of the book titled based on geological epochs?
If you enjoy works brimming with dark imagination, give this one a try.
If you enjoy works brimming with dark imagination, give this one a try.
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