The Bridge (Book Review)

Iain Banks' third book, published in 1986 (a year before his first Culture novel,) is an interesting journey to say the least, but a vortex of pure artistry at best. A witty, clever read that is genuinely funny and enthrallingly original, fun yet serious and vibrant yet inert. The story follows that of an amnesiac man, trapped in a coma as he tries to discover the hidden secrets of the Bridge, a world that rests on a perpetual suspension bridge between two locations, the full purpose and meaning of which he is unaware of. The story could be described as a comedy, a thriller or a love story all at once, with each part of the novel broken into four chapters, preceded by a 'stage' of sorts such as "Metamorphosis" or "Metamorpheus," charting the journey of three protagonists who represent traditional Freudian psychological concepts, including the ID, Ego and Superego with astounding skill.

The story is not what I'd describe as complex necessarily, but rather grand and encapsulating, fitting together neatly with immense satisfaction. His prose is crisp and the overlap with his Culture novels is quite a treat for anyone who has read his SF stuff, (a barbarian with a knife-missile, now that's original!) with references made to literature and poetry which, to those familiar, also evokes a few laughs along the way. The novel is strange, exciting and the dialogue -as one comes to expect from Banks- is lifelike and seamless and it's from these aspects that I -as a budding writer- have learnt so much. His ability to take the first-person and make him unique and -simultaneously- completely disparate from Banks as the writer is top-notch, which is why I imagine Iain considered the novel to be his best, describing it as "...the intellectual of the family... the one that went to university and got a first."

The protagonists are very different people and their mannerisms reflect this, but some of the best narration comes from the character of the Barbarian, whose Glaswegian voice and dialect is rendered with perfect skill, enunciated with every purposeful mis-spelling and solidified by every utterance, underpinned by ID typicalities found within Psychoanalysis. These chapters chart an unforgettable journey of delightful oddities, brim-filled with humour and socio-political commentary that one can match with Banks' own rather easily, summing up his personal dislike of the Thatcher government of the 1980s, without it taking the centre stage but more to the point summing up anti-Tory sentiments in Scotland generally, both back in those days and still to extents, today.

An exuberant, fantastical ride of the greatest imagination, The Bridge is Banks' ode to the memory and what it feels like to simply forget, and whether or not the dream is in fact better than reality.

The Bridge: 2013 Edition