The Bridge

Author: Iain Banks

Iain Banks had written a string of science fiction before he finally burst into print with his brilliant and controversial novel, The Wasp Factory. That and the two novels that followed were clearly informed by science fiction, but they were published as mainstream, where he was regarded as a sort of enfant terrible of the literary scene. It was only after The Bridge was published that he added the middle initial, M, and started to bring out those early unpublished sf novels. But The Bridge, which is one of the very best of all of his novels and which is structured on the model of the Forth Road Bridge which he could see from his bedroom window as a child, can only really be understood as science fiction. It is the story of someone growing up in Scotland from the 1960s to the 80s, gaining material success at the cost of early political ideals. But at the very beginning of the novel he crashes on the Forth Bridge, and in the resultant coma (rather like in Life On Mars) he finds himself on an endless bridge in a complex society where he finds himself having to constantly reassess who and what he is. It's a world that involves curious dreams, a Scottish barbarian, endless wars, his trademark massive structures, and lots of bits of technology that we would soon come to recognise in his Culture novels. Banks was one of the most important writers of science fiction from the 1980s until his death in 2013, yet though he alternated his work between the mainstream novels of Iain Banks and the science fiction of Iain M. Banks, there are very few of the mainstream novels that don't have some element of the fantastic. And The Bridge, the last thing he wrote before his career bifurcated, really does demonstrate the very best of both aspects of his writing.