Bridges the gap between Sci Fi and Fantasy well almost (The Bridge - Iain Banks)

Member Name: mpeh

Product:	The Bridge - Iain Banks
Date:	25/08/01 (157 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Clever plot,, Well executed

Disadvantages: Not as well written as you expect from Banks, Rushed ending

An early Iain Banks which reveals the way he puts his novels together, or at least the way he used to. This is, undoubtably, a 'clever' book and I don't mean that in the derogatory way I would usually, there are concepts involved with the telling of this tale that are complex and involved and require taking away and thinking about, not necessarily conciously but you will find yourself going, 'oh yeah that could mean...' or 'maybe he was talking about this as well'.

The plot is that there is a man who was in a road accident and, in the real world, is in a coma. He is dwelling in a world within his own head, the world of the bridge and, as it says on the blurb on the back, is he nearly dead or more alive than he's ever been? The bridge is an endless structure that stretches forever in each direction. Supposedly there is a land called the kingdom at one end and the city at the other but no one has ever been there or seen them. The book explores the society of the bridge through the eyes of the main character who has awoken with no memory and is being treated for amnesia by a doctor.

Banks weaves elements of past, present and future into the world of the bridge and as the novel progresses the ideas begin to take more and more varied and disturbing shape. Banks explores the psyche of his main character with metaphor, expounding his ideas on the surface of the reality he is trapped within. The character dreams and these dreams reflect different facets of his predicament, different facets of his personality and way of coping with the coma. The world of the bridge is the trap that the coma is in the real world. The interactions with other 'fictitious' characters in the world of the bridge represent the self awareness of the way he reacted to other people in the real world all done on a subconscious level.

Later Banks starts to tell us of the characters life before the accident and the shadowing of the fanta
sy of the bridge with the reality of his previous life, which he doesn't remember, echoing one with the other is very effective. It adds an element of tradgedy to the periods on the bridge as you know you want him to manage to return to the real world and leave the bridge behind him. As I said the ideas behind patches of this book are very complex, the idea that you can reflect a persons psyche by the worlds they create for themselves subconsciously or the way they interact with themselves when removed from external influence is scratched by this book. Banks explores more deeply small areas of these topics but in the main leaves you the reader/writer to explore these concepts yourself in your own way. I think it is easy to read too much into the fantasy periods of this novel, the dreaming and the happenings on the bridge are written to be disjoint and confusing. I'm not sure but I don't think Banks had any definite ideas in mind to portray with these sections and left them unexplained knowing that you the reader would probably search for meaning in them and attribute deeper concepts than he could have written in to each concept. On the other hand there are some very definite second meanings behind some things, to give examples might spoil things so I wont but there are some clever scenarios put together in each world that link together and reflect each other nicely.

A very skillfully written novel this offers a dichotomy, having read other Banks novels I am aware how well he structures most of his stories and even with that knowledge this book is put together very very cleverly. The flip side of this is that the writing style isn't as smooth as the later Banks novels, unsurprising really, you would expect and want a writer to improve over time and this is an early novel (his second after the wasp factory I believe) so the books of Banks' (sorry) I have read which he has written more recently are written with a better style (Against A Dar
k Background is probably the best example of this although I'm not sure how recent it is). So a smoothly polished structure with a less polished style which is what reduces this book to four stars, I nearly gave it three but the ideas are so good I had to err on the side of generosity.

The one thing I didn't like about this book was the ending, it was too fast, almost hurried as if the publisher's deadline was approaching and Banks was nearly there ao he wrapped it up sharpish and popped it in the post. There are a few books by various authors I've read which end too quickly for my liking and I was dissapointed that Banks had done it too, other books of his I've read have been so carefully written as to allow me to think he would never do something so unsatisfying but here he has. Oh well maybe this was a necessary learning step in his writing, (I having never written a book am unaware how easy it is to fall into this trap so am being, very probably and quite usually, over critical) and has improved his later texts no end.

In summary a clever book with myriad ideas which deserve further exploration, written well but not as well as the later Banks novels and with a hurried ending. A very good read, definitely one for Banks fans but not the best one to start with if you're new to him.

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