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Loading... The Bridge (1986)by Iain Banks
 ragwaine | Mar 18, 2011 |  While it is fairly evident throughout what is really going on, the thrust of the book is not so much any "mystery" about the setting so much as it is the atmospheric evocation of a strange, impossible, yet mundane (almost chillingly so) world and the strange mundane people who inhabit it. The rewards of this book, which are not small, lie in that mood and atmosphere, and in the portrayal of how people react to such circumstances. owlcroft | Jan 24, 2011 | Scottish, fiction (  ) ktmc | Sep 15, 2010 | A mix of dreams and dreams during dreams, never really clear what the dreams meant until the end, when it was clear he'd (DON'T READ THIS IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE NOVEL!!) crashed off the 4th Road bridge and was in a coma, but generally irritating and boring (  ) Tifi | Jun 21, 2010 | This is pseudo-fantasy or plain fiction from Banks. The Bridge is a seemingly infinite, self-contained structure, no one sees the ends of the Bridge and no one leaves it. The book is about society in a very restricted sense, in this case, the Bridge society is very 'vertical' - the higher up you are, the higher up you are... Banks gets in his usual shots against society and religion, though by the end of the book, I was really wondering if it had much of a point. There are many dream sequences that may or may not have something to do with the main plot. I read it, but can't really say I enjoyed it that much. (  ) Karlstar | Oct 15, 2009 | no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0349102155, Paperback)The man who wakes up in the extraordinary world of a bridge has amnesia, and his doctor doesn't seem to want to cure him. Does it matter? Exploring the bridge occupies most of his days. But at night there are his dreams. Dreams in which desperate men drive sealed carriages across barren mountains to a bizarre rendezvous; an illiterate barbarian storms an enchanted tower under a stream of verbal abuse; and broken men walk forever over bridges without end, taunted by visions of a doomed sexuality. Lying in bed unconscious after an accident wouldn't be much fun, you'd think. Oh yes? It depends who and what you've left behind. Which is the stranger reality, day or night? Frequently hilarious and consistently disturbing, THE BRIDGE is a novel of outrageous contrasts, constructed chaos and elegant absurdities.(retrieved from Amazon Sun, 06 Jan 2013 00:38:37 -0500) No library descriptions found. |
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The sections on the bridge reminded me a lot Kafka's The Castle but better. The modern sections bored me (as most non-fantastic fiction does - with Philip Roth being the exception). The dreams were very cool, especially the trip to hell. Without the dreams the book would have been a waste of time. Still I thought he could have drop 40-50 pages to make it the perfect length. I didn't really enjoy the "off the bridge" part of the bridge sections.
So I liked it but wouldn't really recommend it to anyone especially since Banks has a bunch of other books that are better. (