The Bridge

I first read The Bridge 25 years ago and thought it one of the best books I had ever read. Coming back to it after all this time I did wonder if it would hold up. Banks has always been one of my favourite authors and thankfully this novel is as strange, moving and funny as it was all those years ago.

The book takes place on a vast bridge where society is strictly regimented based on job, class and dialect. It soon becomes apparent that John Orr, as our protagonist is named by his doctor, is an amnesiac, memory last after an accident. He is under the care of a Doctor Joyce who analyses dreams as a form of treatment. But Orr has no dreams, so makes them up. The bridge is Kafkaesque in it's convoluted bureaucracy and once Orr stops playing the game he finds himself demoted, cast aside. Yesterday's news. His only ally is the Chief Engineer's daughter, Abberlaine Arrol - a decadent, confident young woman who takes Orr to bed as well as under her wing.

There are many layers to this book. It is soon obvious that all of this is inside the head of an unnamed coma patient. Strands of his personality, such as the huge barbarian warrior who speaks in broad Glaswegian and travels a fantasy land peopled with mythical characters such as Charon the Ferryman and Prometheus, are struggling to knit themselves back into a whole.

The novel becomes darker. War breaks out. Orr travels the length of the bridge, stowing away on an express. The imagery becomes more surreal, the horror more explicit.

But interspersed amongst the fantasy there are passages where a life is remembered. A man grows up in Scotland, meets the love of his life, experiences loss, success and all the things that come with love. It is here that Banks flies, foreshadowing the prose of such Scottish sagas as The Crow Road, Espedair Street and even The Quarry. There is a sweet melancholy to these passages and they are my favourite part of the book.

Some might say that Banks never reached these heights again and maybe his decision to split his writing into SF and contemporary fiction robbed him of something. Certainly he never attempted this hybrid again until Transition, many years later, and that book is bonkers, but not a patch on The Bridge. Fiercely inventive, brilliantly written and utterly human, this is a book you need to read.