The Bridge

24/12/2025

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So often we find in Scottish literature the question of the Caledonian Antisyzygy. Iain Banks hasn’t only explored the question in some of his work, including The Bridge; Banks also made it part of his professional and public personality. If the Antisyzygy is the presence of duelling polarities in the one personality, and was examined by G. Gregory Smith in Scottish Literature: Character and Influence, then Banks created two selves to indicate a polarity at work in his own fiction. There is Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks. The first writes what is generally deemed serious literature, and the latter S/F. When asked about this division, Banks explained it biographically and creatively: “It’s my middle name, Menzies. Macmillan thought that the ‘M’ was a bit fussy” and asked him to go by Iain Banks instead. “I thought I’d put it back in for the science fiction. At one point I was going to be John B. Macallan for the science fiction… [but] I decided to keep my own name but put the ‘M’ in, which seemed like a good idea at the time but was a terrible mistake, because I’ve been answering that question ever since, and it does give ammunition to the literary snobs who think I make the distinction because I’m ‘writing down’ when I do science fiction.” (Textualities) We will say more about the biographical Banks later, ignoring the naysayers of New criticism who believed that one ought only to attend to the text, and offer, instead, for the moment, an aspect of Reception theory, one that can absorb thinking too of the writer’s life in the context of the work. As Wolfgang Iser noted: “the reader, in establishing these interrelations between past, present and future, actually cause the text to reveal its potential multiplicity of connections.” The Bridge might be a complicated work of layered meanings, but it can also be read as an evocative work of retrospective affect, with the reader interpreting the book partly through a life that alludes to the writer, as we see similarities between Banks and the main character, but one that becomes even more touching long after the work was written.

There are numerous novelists who have worked between genre writing and literary fiction, including Doris Lessing, George Simenon and Julian Barnes, and some have used pseudonyms to do so (Barnes goes under the name Dan Kavanagh when writing crime fiction). But there is in Banks’ perhaps no clear division, and the M. in the S/F novels suggests a distinction that he makes but wouldn’t want to exaggerate, and how could he when some of the literary novels can resemble fantastic fiction as well?

In The Bridge, we have an occasional work of realism that covers many years in the life of Alex Lennox and his relationship with his parents, but more especially with his long-term, on/off girlfriend Andrea Cramond. Alex is from working-class Glasgow, with his parents living in a pebble-dash council house, while Andrea is from Edinburgh money. Her father is a barrister, and the family live on Moray Place, in a house big enough for them to sell the basement as a self-contained flat after the father dies. Much of the novel, though, attends to Alex’s alter-ego John Orr, who lives in the bridge of the title. It is a world unto itself, though based on the Edinburgh Forth Rail Bridge. The bridge is chiefly, however, a science fiction concept and, as the end of the novel will reveal, a state of consciousness when we find that this first-person figure in the bridge is the third-person character of Alex. Along the way, there is also a barbarian character who speaks in Scots, and who represents no doubt Alex’s deeper unconscious, someone who channels various ancient mythologies and is always ready with a sword: “I was watchin him, ken, in case he tryd enythin, had ma sord at his throate in case he tryd tae turn me intae sumthin wee an nastie.”  

Initially, the story is of the bridge and the barbarian. But in the second half of the novel, it increasingly focuses on Alex in sections that create an elegiac sense of time passing both in the immediate lives of Alex and Andrea, and also more broadly as it incorporates various social events. Banks tells us about Alex’s developing bald spot and Andrea’s hint of a wrinkle. However, the novel moves through historical time too, starting in the seventies and continuing far into the eighties. We know we are in 1977 because Elvis is dead, the Sex Pistols are in the charts, and Alex buys their records even while he prefers the Jam, The Damned and Bruce Springsteen. We then hear of Thatcher’s election and John Lennon’s death, as the 70s move into the 80s, and Alex is starting to make serious money as a geologist and engineer, while the oil industry in Scotland becomes enormously profitable. Torn between his accountant, who knows a bit about tax deductibles, and his conscience, as he enters his later twenties and into his thirties, he buys fancy cars and helps out numerous worthy causes, from poverty in Africa to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua — even if he reckons it might be better to go and fight directly for the latter’s cause.  

While the novel is shaped around the comatose Alex, who in his predicament generates an entire world around the bridge and a further alter-ego given to violent impulses, there is more than enough going on in the ‘realist’ sections to offer up the complexity of a life. But it is as though Banks, in this 1986 novel, is beholden to the fantastic and justifies it in the symbolic, seeing in his central character other warring worlds within, one that the barbarian and the bridge bring out. Thom Nairn notes that when asked what The Crow Road was about, Banks said: “Well, it’s about 147,00 words at the last count, but seriously, it’s about Death, Sex, Faith, cars, Scotland and drink.” (The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies) The same could probably be said about The Bridge but with the fantastic thrown in as well, as though Banks was anticipating his future as an SF writer (his first fantastic novel came out in 1987), and clearly under the influence of the one Scottish book that he admits enormously shaped him: Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, a novel that created a strange, Orwellian Glasgow where daylight is absent and illnesses prevalent. “I was absolutely knocked out by Lanark. I think it’s the best Scottish literature this century. It opened my eyes. I had forgotten what you could do –- you can be self-referential, you can muck about with different voices, characters, time-streams, whatever. Lanark had a huge effect on The Bridge. I’m quite happy to acknowledge that debt.” (Textualities) 

       But the novel also seems to be anticipating the success that Banks would go on to enjoy, becoming a Best-Granta novelist in 1993, seeing a TV adaptation of The Crow Road, a radio version of Espedair Street, and a film of Complicity, just as Alex makes increasingly large sums of money during the oil boom. Like Alex, Banks enjoyed spending his money on cars: “I had a Porsche 911 Turbo, a Porsche Boxster S, a BMW M5 and a Land Rover Discovery.” (Guardian) Alex, over the course of The Bridge, has a Saab, a Toyota MR2, the latest Quattro and eventually an MK II Jaguar. 3.8, the car in which he will crash and afterwards end up in the coma on which the novel is predicated. But if Banks was anticipating his success, he also anticipated his own car accident a decade after the book came out: “he emerged from the wreckage beaming, with cuts and bruises, to tell a horrified Italian couple who had stopped to help: 'Thank God for airbags!’” (Guardian) 

       Alex isn’t so lucky, but he does survive, and one way of looking at the novel is to see it as a book about the hesitations in a life when one’s conscious self isn’t quite aligned with one's subconscious insecurities. Much is made of the class differences between Alex and Andrea, and much is made too of Andrea’s wish to sleep with other men, even if she acknowledges that were she to marry anyone, it would be Alex. Alex has affairs as well, but it isn’t until it looks like he will emerge from the coma that he can see what Andrea wanted was to enjoy life more fully than he could comprehend, as if the money he would spend on the cars that he bought was a way of spending it on something. Before the novel’s conclusion, though, he reckons, “damn I wanna do things.” “I want to travel the Trans-Siberian, go to India, stand on Ayers Rock, get sodden wet in Machupicchu!” 

This may read like a travel advert, but, for Alex, it is a realisation of how little living he has actually done in his life. He has been fretting about Andrea, worrying about his bald spot, and his class status, and while seeing his bank balance expand, it hasn't quite done the same thing for his horizons. Perhaps the passage has a poignancy reading it many years later because while it is earned within the context of a novel that has punctuatingly explored Alex’s limited life, for all his success, it retrospectively brings to mind Banks’ own demise when he seemed to have much living still to do, even if he died at the not so terribly young age of 59. For all the novel’s intricate structure, for all its symbolic use of the Forth Rail Bridge and its asides into the striata of a mind, it works by the end as a novel of grief, of life inevitably slipping away from us and the best we can do is grasp it as fully as our vulnerabilities allow. It also, though, contains within it its own Caledonian Antisyzygy, with Alex having to become lost in a coma that produces a counter self, one that helps him find the sort of person he wishes to become, a person who by the book’s conclusion doesn’t just survive but looks like he might be capable of starting to live and love more openly and freely. The book may offer a complicated surface as it arrives at this point. Yet this appears to be Banks’ message. It is one, neither pat nor profound, but simply poignant. If a book is always more than the sum of its parts, this rests too on the lives beyond the page, either our own (as we might think of how life in Scotland has changed over the years), or Banks’s.  

        This is partly what Iser meant when saying, “the fact that completely different readers can be differently affected by the ‘reality’ of a particular text is ample evidence of the degree to which literary texts transform reading into a creative process that is far above mere perception of what is written.” (Modern Criticism and Theory) The layers a reader may bring to the work are perhaps more complex than anything deliberately generated in the book itself, but who can deny that reading is ever just about the book itself, no matter various theoretical claims that ask us to pretend it happens to be? On this occasion, as we think of how lucky Banks was to survive the crash unharmed that put Alex into a coma, we can see, as well, the bad luck that led Alex to survive, while we well know that Banks died while still in his middle years. To think like this can seem specious (from an academic perspective), but undeniable if you have certain facts to hand and a life embedded in the same reality that Banks lived.   

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Bridge

So often we find in Scottish literature the question of the Caledonian Antisyzygy. Iain Banks hasn’t only explored the question in some of his work, including The Bridge; Banks also made it part of his professional and public personality. If the Antisyzygy is the presence of duelling polarities in the one personality, and was examined by G. Gregory Smith in Scottish Literature: Character and Influence, then Banks created two selves to indicate a polarity at work in his own fiction. There is Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks. The first writes what is generally deemed serious literature, and the latter S/F. When asked about this division, Banks explained it biographically and creatively: “It’s my middle name, Menzies. Macmillan thought that the ‘M’ was a bit fussy” and asked him to go by Iain Banks instead. “I thought I’d put it back in for the science fiction. At one point I was going to be John B. Macallan for the science fiction… [but] I decided to keep my own name but put the ‘M’ in, which seemed like a good idea at the time but was a terrible mistake, because I’ve been answering that question ever since, and it does give ammunition to the literary snobs who think I make the distinction because I’m ‘writing down’ when I do science fiction.” (Textualities) We will say more about the biographical Banks later, ignoring the naysayers of New criticism who believed that one ought only to attend to the text, and offer, instead, for the moment, an aspect of Reception theory, one that can absorb thinking too of the writer’s life in the context of the work. As Wolfgang Iser noted: “the reader, in establishing these interrelations between past, present and future, actually cause the text to reveal its potential multiplicity of connections.” The Bridge might be a complicated work of layered meanings, but it can also be read as an evocative work of retrospective affect, with the reader interpreting the book partly through a life that alludes to the writer, as we see similarities between Banks and the main character, but one that becomes even more touching long after the work was written.

There are numerous novelists who have worked between genre writing and literary fiction, including Doris Lessing, George Simenon and Julian Barnes, and some have used pseudonyms to do so (Barnes goes under the name Dan Kavanagh when writing crime fiction). But there is in Banks’ perhaps no clear division, and the M. in the S/F novels suggests a distinction that he makes but wouldn’t want to exaggerate, and how could he when some of the literary novels can resemble fantastic fiction as well?

In The Bridge, we have an occasional work of realism that covers many years in the life of Alex Lennox and his relationship with his parents, but more especially with his long-term, on/off girlfriend Andrea Cramond. Alex is from working-class Glasgow, with his parents living in a pebble-dash council house, while Andrea is from Edinburgh money. Her father is a barrister, and the family live on Moray Place, in a house big enough for them to sell the basement as a self-contained flat after the father dies. Much of the novel, though, attends to Alex’s alter-ego John Orr, who lives in the bridge of the title. It is a world unto itself, though based on the Edinburgh Forth Rail Bridge. The bridge is chiefly, however, a science fiction concept and, as the end of the novel will reveal, a state of consciousness when we find that this first-person figure in the bridge is the third-person character of Alex. Along the way, there is also a barbarian character who speaks in Scots, and who represents no doubt Alex’s deeper unconscious, someone who channels various ancient mythologies and is always ready with a sword: “I was watchin him, ken, in case he tryd enythin, had ma sord at his throate in case he tryd tae turn me intae sumthin wee an nastie.”  

Initially, the story is of the bridge and the barbarian. But in the second half of the novel, it increasingly focuses on Alex in sections that create an elegiac sense of time passing both in the immediate lives of Alex and Andrea, and also more broadly as it incorporates various social events. Banks tells us about Alex’s developing bald spot and Andrea’s hint of a wrinkle. However, the novel moves through historical time too, starting in the seventies and continuing far into the eighties. We know we are in 1977 because Elvis is dead, the Sex Pistols are in the charts, and Alex buys their records even while he prefers the Jam, The Damned and Bruce Springsteen. We then hear of Thatcher’s election and John Lennon’s death, as the 70s move into the 80s, and Alex is starting to make serious money as a geologist and engineer, while the oil industry in Scotland becomes enormously profitable. Torn between his accountant, who knows a bit about tax deductibles, and his conscience, as he enters his later twenties and into his thirties, he buys fancy cars and helps out numerous worthy causes, from poverty in Africa to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua — even if he reckons it might be better to go and fight directly for the latter’s cause.  

While the novel is shaped around the comatose Alex, who in his predicament generates an entire world around the bridge and a further alter-ego given to violent impulses, there is more than enough going on in the ‘realist’ sections to offer up the complexity of a life. But it is as though Banks, in this 1986 novel, is beholden to the fantastic and justifies it in the symbolic, seeing in his central character other warring worlds within, one that the barbarian and the bridge bring out. Thom Nairn notes that when asked what The Crow Road was about, Banks said: “Well, it’s about 147,00 words at the last count, but seriously, it’s about Death, Sex, Faith, cars, Scotland and drink.” (The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies) The same could probably be said about The Bridge but with the fantastic thrown in as well, as though Banks was anticipating his future as an SF writer (his first fantastic novel came out in 1987), and clearly under the influence of the one Scottish book that he admits enormously shaped him: Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, a novel that created a strange, Orwellian Glasgow where daylight is absent and illnesses prevalent. “I was absolutely knocked out by Lanark. I think it’s the best Scottish literature this century. It opened my eyes. I had forgotten what you could do –- you can be self-referential, you can muck about with different voices, characters, time-streams, whatever. Lanark had a huge effect on The Bridge. I’m quite happy to acknowledge that debt.” (Textualities) 

       But the novel also seems to be anticipating the success that Banks would go on to enjoy, becoming a Best-Granta novelist in 1993, seeing a TV adaptation of The Crow Road, a radio version of Espedair Street, and a film of Complicity, just as Alex makes increasingly large sums of money during the oil boom. Like Alex, Banks enjoyed spending his money on cars: “I had a Porsche 911 Turbo, a Porsche Boxster S, a BMW M5 and a Land Rover Discovery.” (Guardian) Alex, over the course of The Bridge, has a Saab, a Toyota MR2, the latest Quattro and eventually an MK II Jaguar. 3.8, the car in which he will crash and afterwards end up in the coma on which the novel is predicated. But if Banks was anticipating his success, he also anticipated his own car accident a decade after the book came out: “he emerged from the wreckage beaming, with cuts and bruises, to tell a horrified Italian couple who had stopped to help: 'Thank God for airbags!’” (Guardian) 

       Alex isn’t so lucky, but he does survive, and one way of looking at the novel is to see it as a book about the hesitations in a life when one’s conscious self isn’t quite aligned with one's subconscious insecurities. Much is made of the class differences between Alex and Andrea, and much is made too of Andrea’s wish to sleep with other men, even if she acknowledges that were she to marry anyone, it would be Alex. Alex has affairs as well, but it isn’t until it looks like he will emerge from the coma that he can see what Andrea wanted was to enjoy life more fully than he could comprehend, as if the money he would spend on the cars that he bought was a way of spending it on something. Before the novel’s conclusion, though, he reckons, “damn I wanna do things.” “I want to travel the Trans-Siberian, go to India, stand on Ayers Rock, get sodden wet in Machupicchu!” 

This may read like a travel advert, but, for Alex, it is a realisation of how little living he has actually done in his life. He has been fretting about Andrea, worrying about his bald spot, and his class status, and while seeing his bank balance expand, it hasn't quite done the same thing for his horizons. Perhaps the passage has a poignancy reading it many years later because while it is earned within the context of a novel that has punctuatingly explored Alex’s limited life, for all his success, it retrospectively brings to mind Banks’ own demise when he seemed to have much living still to do, even if he died at the not so terribly young age of 59. For all the novel’s intricate structure, for all its symbolic use of the Forth Rail Bridge and its asides into the striata of a mind, it works by the end as a novel of grief, of life inevitably slipping away from us and the best we can do is grasp it as fully as our vulnerabilities allow. It also, though, contains within it its own Caledonian Antisyzygy, with Alex having to become lost in a coma that produces a counter self, one that helps him find the sort of person he wishes to become, a person who by the book’s conclusion doesn’t just survive but looks like he might be capable of starting to live and love more openly and freely. The book may offer a complicated surface as it arrives at this point. Yet this appears to be Banks’ message. It is one, neither pat nor profound, but simply poignant. If a book is always more than the sum of its parts, this rests too on the lives beyond the page, either our own (as we might think of how life in Scotland has changed over the years), or Banks’s.  

        This is partly what Iser meant when saying, “the fact that completely different readers can be differently affected by the ‘reality’ of a particular text is ample evidence of the degree to which literary texts transform reading into a creative process that is far above mere perception of what is written.” (Modern Criticism and Theory) The layers a reader may bring to the work are perhaps more complex than anything deliberately generated in the book itself, but who can deny that reading is ever just about the book itself, no matter various theoretical claims that ask us to pretend it happens to be? On this occasion, as we think of how lucky Banks was to survive the crash unharmed that put Alex into a coma, we can see, as well, the bad luck that led Alex to survive, while we well know that Banks died while still in his middle years. To think like this can seem specious (from an academic perspective), but undeniable if you have certain facts to hand and a life embedded in the same reality that Banks lived.   


© Tony McKibbin