The Bridge
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4.2 • 43 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'A stunning book. Banks' powerful imagination is joined to a rare ability to be truly funny while exploring a nightmare world' Sunday Times
A man lies in a coma after a near-fatal accident. His body broken, his memory vanished, he finds himself in the surreal world of the bridge - a world free of the usual constraints of time and space, a world where dream and fantasy, past and future, fuse.
Who is this man? Where is he? Is he more dead than alive? Or has he never been so alive before?
Praise for Iain Banks:
'The most imaginative novelist of his generation' The Times
'His verve and talent will always be recognised, and his work will always find and enthral new readers' Ken MacLeod, Guardian
'His work was mordant, surreal, and fiercely intelligent' Neil Gaiman
'An exceptional wordsmith' Scotsman
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Orr, the otherwise unnamed protagonist of this Pynchonesque novel, is a successful Scottish engineer who's a bit fed up with life: his work doesn't really interest him anymore; years of doping and boozing have dulled him; his girlfriend has other lovers (he does too, but he would rather she was monogamous). Then one evening he crashes his classic Jaguar into a parked MG. The aftermath is coma and months of amnesiac trance, a condition that Orr apparently comes to prefer. The reader, however, only understands all this towards the end of the novel. Virtually the whole of the narrative consists of Orr's trauma-induced hallucinations. The bridge of the title is a fantastically ramifying construct in Orr's brain resembling an outer-space city in a science fiction movie. Banks's ( The Player of Games ) novel is satire, and its target turns out to be the British Isles' equivalent of American ``yuppies.'' Deploying a wide range of stylistic devices, the narrative condemns fiercely an overly mechanistic society and its self-referential ethos.
Customer Reviews
Banks' Best
The Bridge is Iain Banks' most intellectual novel, and his most engrossing one. You will not be disappointed with this read.
The price on the other hand? You can get two 'The Bridge' paperbacks for that...
It's What You Wrote As a Child
Let me start by saying I have really enjoyed Banks' other works and his darkly skewed visions of life, but this was disappointing. A bleak but weird and surreal take on life on a bridge which kept reminding me of the Forth Rail Bridge in Fife for some reason, but the ending? Oh, the ending! I know it's a plot spoiler, but remember those stories you wrote as a kid where you were in a fantastical land full of myth and wonder and then you woke up "and it was all a dream"? Yes, well, there you go...
Somewhat amateurish.