The Bridge (Iain Banks)

The Bridge is a fantastic novel by the Scottish writer Iain Banks and was first published in 1986 under the English title The Bridge . The German first edition was published in 1993 by Heyne, Munich. Rosemarie Hundertmark translated the text.

Formal structure

The bridge comprises 310 pages, which are divided into the two large chapters Metamorphosis and Metamorphheus . The two chapters are first numerically divided from one to four and then into six different geological ages naming sub-chapters. The two sections are framed by the introductory coma and the concluding coda .

subjects

The bridge is about the unconventional love triangle between the engineer Alex, the Slavist Andrea and their Parisian lover Gustave. A social advancement career in Scotland in the 1970s is described, at the height of the Cold War and the Thatcher era , which symbolizes the brutal clash of hippie dreams and political realities. Questions of identity and personality development are discussed within the problem of a coma patient. Last but not least, it is about dream constructs and fantasies of omnipotence and of course bridges as a practical and symbolic connection between two points.

action

The bridge is told from the perspective of three protagonists - John Orr, Alex and an unnamed barbarian warrior. The three each represent different aspects of the comatose narrator, so they are ultimately one person.

In the novel, the three perspectives are often interwoven. Here they are reproduced largely linearly.

Alex is a realistic person whose life story is told as well. Born in Glasgow , he studied geology and engineering at the University of Edinburgh , falls in love with Andrea Cramond and lives with her permanently in an open relationship . While Andrea comes from a wealthy middle-class family, Alex is sometimes ashamed of his working-class background , but this ultimately promotes his ambition. He becomes co-owner of a prosperous engineering company, but suffers from the political conditions of the Cold War and the Thatcher era. The fact that Gustave, Andrea's French lover, has MS and she spends more and more time in Paris doesn't necessarily make his life any easier. After a sentimental meeting with an old friend in Fife , pregnant with alcohol and cannabis , against his better judgment , Alex drives home by car. On the way, while crossing the Forth Road Bridge, he is suddenly overcome, like a vision, by the beauty and strength of the neighboring Forth Railway Bridge . He loses control of the car and crashes, almost unbraked, into a car parked on the hard shoulder. In the hospital he falls into a coma and sums up his life there.

John Orr wakes up, without memories, on an imaginary bridge that, in contrast to its real role model, seems to have no beginning and no end and is also populated with whole crowds. According to Dr. Joyce, his doctor treating him, he was fished out of the water half-drowned at the foot of a bridge pier. The society on the bridge is a class society . As long as John Orr is in treatment with his prominent doctor, he belongs to the privileged part of society and lives a luxurious, comfortable life. When he resists the attempt to cure his amnesia with the help of hypnosis , he falls from grace and is banished to the proletarian underworld of the bridge. John Orr's life is becoming increasingly chaotic. After helping the paramedics in a serious train accident , he falls asleep on the hospital train and drives to the end of the bridge and far beyond. He ends up on the mainland in a region devastated by war, is finally recruited himself and is again on a train, where he serves as an orderly for some military leadership. The end of his journey leads him back to the beginning of the bridge, which, however, seems largely destroyed. John Orr is faced with the decision to wake up or to remember or to finally lose himself in the fantastic.

The Freudian theory based on that awareness in I - It and the superego is divided, represents the Barbarian in the novel clearly the time . Guided by an arrogant guardian who crouches on his shoulder, the barbarian hacks and slaughters his way through an extremely surreal reality in the style of a classic hack & slay . After slaughtering various witches and wizards, he descends into the underworld and destroys various ancient myths there . He kills the eagle that eats Prometheus liver whereupon Prometheus dies of a pathological liver overgrowth. He rolls the stone with Sisyphus onto the mountain and wedges it there, which makes Sisyphus a really happy person. He petrified Charon with the severed head of Medusa , beheaded the hundred-headed Cerberus and finally found an unconscious man in a sick bed in an empty palace, surrounded by monitors. Before he can kill him, a woman's voice warns him not to do that, because at some point he would be this man. In fact, he leaves the man alone and leaves the underworld without prey. The next time he appears, the barbarian is 300 years older and is waiting to die. He is sitting in a spaceship on a strange planet and is attacked by a young blond warrior. With the fatal blow, however, the guardian spirit transfers the consciousness of the old barbarian into the boy's body and everything starts over.

In the original, Banks had the barbarians narrate in the deepest Scottish dialect, a technique that Irvine Welsh introduced seven years earlier in his novel Trainspotting . In the German translation, the alienation effect is mainly represented by a crude spelling . For example, the barbarian judges his guardian spirit:

"Allerdinx like me, since I've been with me, I've been fine and taught me a lot of new words so that I am now more educated than before." (P. 82)

In the final coda, an inner monologue discusses the pros and cons of returning to real life. Ultimately, it's the smell of Andrea Cramond sitting next to his hospital bed that lures Alex out of his coma. However, he replies to her friendly “welcome” with a rather doubtful “Oh, yes?”.

Allusions and symbols

Some characters in the novel are allusions to real people who were involved in the construction of the Forth Railway Bridge. Chief Engineer Arrol embodies the owner of the construction company, Sir William Arrol . The engineers Baker and Fowler commemorate the two main architects of the bridge, Sir Benjamin Baker and Sir John Fowler .

Literary importance and criticism

Iain Banks himself rated Die Brücke as his personal favorite within his oeuvre: "I think The Bridge is the best of my books."

Kafkaesque and multi-layered, it is perhaps Banks' non-science fiction novel that is closest to his cultural cycle , especially when you consider that a knife rocket even plays a role in the end. However, Banks says: “That a knife rocket is enough for the purists to define Die Brücke as a cultural novel; - poor I would say. "

" The Bridge ... is a novel that English teachers should definitely recommend as follow-up reading for their older students."

Publisher information

• Iain M. Banks: The Bridge . Macmillan, London 1986, ISBN 0-333-41285-0 (English, original edition).
• Iain M. Banks: The Bridge . Heyne, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-453-03906-8 .

swell

1. ^ The Books of Iain Banks - and Iain M Banks. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on May 9, 2008 ; Retrieved May 9, 2008 . 
2. ^ What's in an M (or) What a difference an M makes. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on September 28, 2007 ; Retrieved September 28, 2007 . 
3. ^ The Worlds of Iain Banks. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on May 3, 2014 ; Retrieved January 18, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.