A cascade of imagination

Press, 23 January 1988, Page 25

A cascade of imagination

The Bridge. By lain Banks. Pan, 1987. 286 pp. $11.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) Banks has written two fascinating previous novels and has excelled his surrealistic but completely controlled style with this, his latest. All three books have the common theme of alternate worlds which exist both in the individual’s mind and are then projected on to his surroundings. The first was a story of a child made insane by his/her father; the second a mystery of all that survives of some civilisation; and this tells of a man with amnesia transported into a world circumscribed by a huge bridge. The narrator’s existence vacillates between treatments to try to recover his memory, and to fit him into being a unit in a controlled structure; with strange wanderers moving across the land, for instance talking broad Gaelic dialects and killing mythical Greek heroes, as well as ordinary folk who get in their way. Always there are dim threads of memory brought to the surface by perhaps a glimpsed pattern or skin wrinkles on a person’s face, and inverted buildings like enlarged lock tumblers, but when they are followed they lead to nothingness.

The language ranges from the almost nonsensical, illiterate spelling of a dialect, to poetry such as “Here I

am in a tiling become place, the link become location, the means become end and route become destination ... and in this long articulated symbol, phallic and poised between the limbs of our great iron icon.” The trapped man cannot work out whether the bridge leads anywhere, or goes in a circle, or whether there is the “City” in one direction and “Kingdom” in the other, and what these actually mean. He is shifted from apartment to apartment, handed from one psychiatrist to another, and the only picture on this television screen is of a man in a coma in a sterile hospital room. "Creative dreaming” lets him escape, but the reader is left to ponder what is dream and what is actuality in the life of this man without a memory. As in this author’s previous two books to give the ending, which helps to unravel some of the mystery and requires rereading to develop it into a fuller understanding, would be a pity for the reader who has to think through the various events to pick repetitive clues — such as an ache in a specific physical location and a handerchief with a monogram that keeps reappearing after being pristinely cleaned every time it is dirtied. The book is an elegant piece of work, as carefully put together as the bridge with its endless interlocking crosses.