Author: Iain Banks-without-the-M
Publisher: Macmillan
I’m a ginormously huge, rabidly proselytizing advocate of the science fiction works of Iain M. Banks with an M (e.g. Use of Weapons, Excession, Look to Windward, etc.), but I’ve always held back from his mainstream fiction as, at first glance, it seemed very Scotto- or at least Brito-centric and thus less relatable.
As with most of the thoughts floating around this shaggy old head of mine, this one also turned out to be completely wrong.
While both Walking on Glass (1985) and The Bridge (1986)—Banks’s second and third mainstream fiction novels after Wasp Factory—are at least partially set in 1980s London and Scotland, respectively, they’re both far more concerned with the interior life of their protagonists than the superficial details of life in the UK.
The two novels share a lot of similarities both structurally and thematically.
Structurally, they both weave together three separate narratives which at first glance appear separate, but whose connections gradually become apparent as the story progresses.
Walking on Glass is the more opaque of the two, the connections among its strands more tangled and harder to unravel. There’s Graham Park, a shy art student smitten with an elusive and mysterious woman named Sara ffitch (two F’s, lowercase); Steven Grout, a possibly delusional man convinced he is actually a noble warrior exiled from another time or place imprisoned on Earth; and in the most SFnal thread, a man named Quiss, a warrior who has been exiled to a crumbling castle made of books and illuminated by glowing fish, where the only way to escape is to win nonsensical games such as one-dimensional chess and blank dominos and answer a nonsense riddle: What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?
The “point” (or maybe the “question” to put it better) is to what extent the people in the three stories are delusional or engaging with reality. Grout at first glance appears to be a lunatic, but the Quiss story suggests there are indeed warriors in another time/place, thus creating an element of doubt. The waters are further muddied when Grout discovers a discarded matchbook with the riddle “What happens when an unstoppable force meets and immovable object?” raising the possibility that it’s actually Quiss’s story which is delusional. If you extend that line of thought to the one that seems the most mundane—Graham’s hopeless pining for an unavailable woman—then we start to see how much of life is built on seeing what we want to see, believing what we want to believe. In a way, Graham’s behavior is as crazy and nonsensical as Grout’s or Quiss’s.
The Bridge also follows three plot lines, this time involving Alex, a successful engineer who crashes his car near the Firth of Forth bridge in Scotland and slips into a coma, John Orr, his alter ego inside the coma, and the Barbarian, a violent Conan figure who exists within John Orr’s dreams—a dream within a coma.
As Alex lies in a coma John awakes on The Bridge of the title, a kind of enormous version of the Firth of Forth bridge inhabited—like the London Bridge of long ago—by thousands of people in a kind of Terry Gilliam/Brazil-esque society of secretive agencies and societal rules. A psychiatrist tries to help John by analyzing his dreams, but John resists—for reasons that become clear as we learn more about Alex’s history—and invents dreams instead. One of his real dreams is of the Barbarian, a kind of uber-Conan killer assisted by a wisecracking familiar and a flying dagger called a “knife missile” (a term instantly recognizable to anyone who has read Banks’s Culture stories).
Here, I think the idea is that all three—Alex, John and the Barbarian—are leading lives governed by what are, when you get right down to it, nonsensical rules and standards. The Barbarian inhabits the world of Fantasy and myth, with spells and curses made or broken acausally, while John’s Kafkaesque world is similarly arbitrary, with people marshalled and ordered about for reasons they cannot understand or articulate. As with Walking on Glass, this realization leads us to look at the mundane story line, in this case Alex, his professional frustrations and his tangled love affairs, and see how our world, too, is governed by pointless and meaningless rules.
Both novels overflow with Banks’s cheery wit and exuberant imagination, especially in their most fantastical modes—Quiss’s castle and the Barbarian’s adventures.
Walking on Glass definitely feels the less polished of the two, with the twist/reveal in Graham’s story managing to be at once both entirely predictable and then from out of nowhere, over the space of a few paragraphs, just weirdly and unnecessarily convoluted and grotesque. There’s about three twists in a row and they’re all just dumped on you with no warning in one scene, which honestly just feels kind of cheap and detracts from the essential groundedness of Graham’s story line.
In addition, the connections among the three story lines aren’t really clarified, but left fuzzy and open to interpretation, which could be frustrating for many readers.
The Bridge, by contrast, is much more silky and smooth, and the humor more pervasive and deft, though my reaction to the ending was that Banks went too far in the other direction after Walking on Glass—instead of leaving things undefined, here he really just lays out the theme and message in 60-point Impact font, THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS. As a counter-reaction to people scratching their heads over Walking on Glass? Who knows.
Appropriately though, both books taught me the folly of artificially limiting what you read to one genre, and to avoid being bound by senseless and meaningless categories.
As with most of the thoughts floating around this shaggy old head of mine, this one also turned out to be completely wrong.
The two novels share a lot of similarities both structurally and thematically.
Structurally, they both weave together three separate narratives which at first glance appear separate, but whose connections gradually become apparent as the story progresses.
Walking on Glass is the more opaque of the two, the connections among its strands more tangled and harder to unravel. There’s Graham Park, a shy art student smitten with an elusive and mysterious woman named Sara ffitch (two F’s, lowercase); Steven Grout, a possibly delusional man convinced he is actually a noble warrior exiled from another time or place imprisoned on Earth; and in the most SFnal thread, a man named Quiss, a warrior who has been exiled to a crumbling castle made of books and illuminated by glowing fish, where the only way to escape is to win nonsensical games such as one-dimensional chess and blank dominos and answer a nonsense riddle: What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?
The “point” (or maybe the “question” to put it better) is to what extent the people in the three stories are delusional or engaging with reality. Grout at first glance appears to be a lunatic, but the Quiss story suggests there are indeed warriors in another time/place, thus creating an element of doubt. The waters are further muddied when Grout discovers a discarded matchbook with the riddle “What happens when an unstoppable force meets and immovable object?” raising the possibility that it’s actually Quiss’s story which is delusional. If you extend that line of thought to the one that seems the most mundane—Graham’s hopeless pining for an unavailable woman—then we start to see how much of life is built on seeing what we want to see, believing what we want to believe. In a way, Graham’s behavior is as crazy and nonsensical as Grout’s or Quiss’s.
The Bridge also follows three plot lines, this time involving Alex, a successful engineer who crashes his car near the Firth of Forth bridge in Scotland and slips into a coma, John Orr, his alter ego inside the coma, and the Barbarian, a violent Conan figure who exists within John Orr’s dreams—a dream within a coma.
As Alex lies in a coma John awakes on The Bridge of the title, a kind of enormous version of the Firth of Forth bridge inhabited—like the London Bridge of long ago—by thousands of people in a kind of Terry Gilliam/Brazil-esque society of secretive agencies and societal rules. A psychiatrist tries to help John by analyzing his dreams, but John resists—for reasons that become clear as we learn more about Alex’s history—and invents dreams instead. One of his real dreams is of the Barbarian, a kind of uber-Conan killer assisted by a wisecracking familiar and a flying dagger called a “knife missile” (a term instantly recognizable to anyone who has read Banks’s Culture stories).
Here, I think the idea is that all three—Alex, John and the Barbarian—are leading lives governed by what are, when you get right down to it, nonsensical rules and standards. The Barbarian inhabits the world of Fantasy and myth, with spells and curses made or broken acausally, while John’s Kafkaesque world is similarly arbitrary, with people marshalled and ordered about for reasons they cannot understand or articulate. As with Walking on Glass, this realization leads us to look at the mundane story line, in this case Alex, his professional frustrations and his tangled love affairs, and see how our world, too, is governed by pointless and meaningless rules.
Both novels overflow with Banks’s cheery wit and exuberant imagination, especially in their most fantastical modes—Quiss’s castle and the Barbarian’s adventures.
Walking on Glass definitely feels the less polished of the two, with the twist/reveal in Graham’s story managing to be at once both entirely predictable and then from out of nowhere, over the space of a few paragraphs, just weirdly and unnecessarily convoluted and grotesque. There’s about three twists in a row and they’re all just dumped on you with no warning in one scene, which honestly just feels kind of cheap and detracts from the essential groundedness of Graham’s story line.
In addition, the connections among the three story lines aren’t really clarified, but left fuzzy and open to interpretation, which could be frustrating for many readers.
The Bridge, by contrast, is much more silky and smooth, and the humor more pervasive and deft, though my reaction to the ending was that Banks went too far in the other direction after Walking on Glass—instead of leaving things undefined, here he really just lays out the theme and message in 60-point Impact font, THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS. As a counter-reaction to people scratching their heads over Walking on Glass? Who knows.
Appropriately though, both books taught me the folly of artificially limiting what you read to one genre, and to avoid being bound by senseless and meaningless categories.
