The Bridge by Iain Banks--Review/Thoughts
May. 18th, 2011 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiThe Bridge by Iain Banks, review and thoughts:
Non-spoilery summary: Man with amnesia has bizarre and surreal adventures on a giant bridge seemingly connected to nothing. Sounds kind of neat, right? It is neat if you're primarily interested in mind-bending world building. If you're interested in character development, human drama, or plot, not so much.
Spoilers follow:
I found this book disappointing, which says as much about me as Banks. He is a supremely gifted world builder and brain teaser. He has an endless and enviable store of impressive architecture, odd devices, Kafka-esque social strangeness, quirky plays on language, diverse scenery, strange machines, funny little creatures, and other defamiliarizing items. I should hope to ever be 1/100 the world builder he is. If you read for that stuff, you'll probably love just about everything he's written.
He just rarely writes much else.* This particular story has a very simple and obvious plot: man gets in car crash, dreams weird dreams, then wakes from coma. I spent the whole book assuming there would be some twist on this plot set up literally from page one--but unless I really missed something in my skimming of the last 50 pages, there wasn't.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book is the way an entire novel that consists 100% of walking through the maze of a man's mind can make him such a flat and underdeveloped character. I spent quite some time thinking about how this can be. I think the reasons are twofold:
1) The dream symbolism, while clever and often interesting, is not deeply psychological. It has a lot to do with being an engineer and getting in a crash on a bridge. This absence of psychological resonance stems from...
2) ... the absence of much of a psyche to relate anything to. Now, the protagonist is not devoid of life history. I could tell you a lot of things about him:
* he's an engineer
* he believes in free love and often has casual sex
* he's closer to his father than mother
* he's Scottish and hates Margaret Thatcher
* he's an ex-hippie and does recreational drugs
* he likes hippie rock
* he loves his sexual friend/partner very much
* he worries about his flab
* he golfs
* he likes fast cars
* he has a close group of friends since college
* he makes good money
* he's generally caring and non-possessive
* he's traveled to the Soviet Union and the Middle East
Etc.
The thing is it's a list of things. Even in the book itself, it often reduces to little more than a list. "He took up golf. He bought a new house. He started seeing Andrea less often." He reads like an exercise in generating character backstory without much of a person's ever being put inside the character. To say that he's a well-developed character because of details like his being an engineer is like saying Ivan Karamazov is a well-developed character because he is a journalist, his mother's dead, he's graduated from college, he doesn't like his father, etc.
I would have preferred this book as a short story, where the world building could shine without needing much of a protagonist to sustain it. I did enjoy the Scottishness because I rarely read Scottish books. I also enjoyed the visual imagery and the symbolism of the handkerchief because it was unusual.
* Exceptions I have read are Inversions and Use of Weapons, which rise above like Great Expectations rises above most of Dickens.
Non-spoilery summary: Man with amnesia has bizarre and surreal adventures on a giant bridge seemingly connected to nothing. Sounds kind of neat, right? It is neat if you're primarily interested in mind-bending world building. If you're interested in character development, human drama, or plot, not so much.
Spoilers follow:
I found this book disappointing, which says as much about me as Banks. He is a supremely gifted world builder and brain teaser. He has an endless and enviable store of impressive architecture, odd devices, Kafka-esque social strangeness, quirky plays on language, diverse scenery, strange machines, funny little creatures, and other defamiliarizing items. I should hope to ever be 1/100 the world builder he is. If you read for that stuff, you'll probably love just about everything he's written.
He just rarely writes much else.* This particular story has a very simple and obvious plot: man gets in car crash, dreams weird dreams, then wakes from coma. I spent the whole book assuming there would be some twist on this plot set up literally from page one--but unless I really missed something in my skimming of the last 50 pages, there wasn't.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book is the way an entire novel that consists 100% of walking through the maze of a man's mind can make him such a flat and underdeveloped character. I spent quite some time thinking about how this can be. I think the reasons are twofold:
1) The dream symbolism, while clever and often interesting, is not deeply psychological. It has a lot to do with being an engineer and getting in a crash on a bridge. This absence of psychological resonance stems from...
2) ... the absence of much of a psyche to relate anything to. Now, the protagonist is not devoid of life history. I could tell you a lot of things about him:
* he's an engineer
* he believes in free love and often has casual sex
* he's closer to his father than mother
* he's Scottish and hates Margaret Thatcher
* he's an ex-hippie and does recreational drugs
* he likes hippie rock
* he loves his sexual friend/partner very much
* he worries about his flab
* he golfs
* he likes fast cars
* he has a close group of friends since college
* he makes good money
* he's generally caring and non-possessive
* he's traveled to the Soviet Union and the Middle East
Etc.
The thing is it's a list of things. Even in the book itself, it often reduces to little more than a list. "He took up golf. He bought a new house. He started seeing Andrea less often." He reads like an exercise in generating character backstory without much of a person's ever being put inside the character. To say that he's a well-developed character because of details like his being an engineer is like saying Ivan Karamazov is a well-developed character because he is a journalist, his mother's dead, he's graduated from college, he doesn't like his father, etc.
I would have preferred this book as a short story, where the world building could shine without needing much of a protagonist to sustain it. I did enjoy the Scottishness because I rarely read Scottish books. I also enjoyed the visual imagery and the symbolism of the handkerchief because it was unusual.
* Exceptions I have read are Inversions and Use of Weapons, which rise above like Great Expectations rises above most of Dickens.
