I mentioned last week that Iain Banks called The Bridge the intellectual of his family of novels – “the one that went away to university and got a first”. Now that I’ve read the book, I can’t help speculating on a few other things that the novel must have got up to while on campus. Clearly, it developed a liking for psychedelic rock, and – as described late on in the book – accompanying doses of a certain “chemical which alter[s] reality”. It seems to have huffed a lot of weed. It must have taken an interest in engineering. It read about socialism. It also, crucially, read Lanark by Alasdair Gray.
This latter bit of extra-curricular reading suits our Scotland month particularly well. During the selection process, Banks and Alasdair Gray were far and away the two most requested authors, so it seems fitting that the book that came out of the hat is a tribute to Gray by Banks. The Bridge, as Banks always made clear, wouldn’t have existed if Lanark hadn’t paved the way.
The parallels between the books become plain even from a plot summary. I was tempted to write “brief plot summary”, but another thing that both books have in common is that they defy easy description. So here I’ll set down summaries that leave out far more than they put in, but are still long and involved – and hopefully reveal something of the fascinating complexity of these two outstanding books:
Lanark is, as its subtitle tells us, “A Life In 4 Books”. The novel opens at Book Three, moves on to Book One (following a prologue), then Book Two, then Book Four (briefly interrupted by an epilogue which, as a voice called “the author” explains, is “too important” to go at the end).
Book Three begins in a train carriage and features a man who can’t remember who he is and so decides to call himself Lanark. We follow him to the strange, perpetually dark city of Unthank, a bleak dystopia where strange diseases abound and hospitals filter their patients between those they cure and those they send off to provide fuel and power.
Books One and Two move focus (apparently) to Duncan Thaw, born in a tenement in Glasgow (a city both like and unlike Unthank) just before the second world war. We follow Duncan as he moves out to the countryside after a bomb lands on his street, returning to the great industrial city the year after the war ends, going to the Glasgow School of Art where he excels, obsesses and fails to connect with women and so experiences an accelerating mental decline that eventually leads him to a watery death in the North Sea “knowing nothing but the need not to breathe”.
It becomes increasingly likely that Lanark is Duncan moving through an afterlife where Glasgow has been translated to a shadowy hell and the failures of his life take on haunting significance. Likely – but not certain. Everything is brought into question in Book Four as Lanark travels back to Unthank through a land in a state of decay and disintegration, has encounters with his own author, it told that he exists only in print anyway and there’s little he can do to stop the apocalypse …
The Bridge too has connected narratives – but this time there are three rather than two. The book begins in a stream of consciousness as Alex Lennox (we learn his name later, in a reference to the Eurythmics, along with what is actually happening to him during this sweary and fractured episode) crashes his car on the Forth road bridge.
We then move onto a second narrative, which sees John Orr (the rhyme with Thaw probably isn’t coincidental) relating a dream in which he comes to a railway station, gets into a carriage and rides off to meet his double on a lonely road. Back in the (apparent) waking world, we come to learn that Orr has recently been fished out of the sea onto a “fucking great bridge”. Like Lanark, he has no memory and must work out how to live in a strange new realm and within a society spread about the spans of that huge bridge. It’s a society that appears ever more stratified the more he comes to understand it, and which eventually descends into war and chaos while Orr rides away on trains that have no apparent endpoint or purpose.
The third narrative follows a swordsman whose thoughts are set down in robust Scots dialect, who mainly thinks about stoving heads in, raping and pillaging, but whose life is made more complicated by a familiar who whispers complicated stratagems into his ear and craps down his back.
Meanwhile, the Alex Lennox narrative moves back in time to relate his university career, his falling in love, his flourishing career, his difficulties equating his socialism with his prosperity under Margaret Thatcher and the eventual path that leads to his car crash.
As in Lanark, it begins to seem as though these separate stories are all about the life and near-death of the same character. As the bridge collapses and outside forces invade it, so the narrative starts to blur, different worlds impinge on each other, different voices speak. The adventures on the bridge, and as a barbarian, seem to be taking place inside Alexander’s mind as he lies in hospital in a coma – reality appears to be waiting for him, if only he can open his eyes.
So. You see the structural parallels between the books. They also have plenty of ideas in common, particularly about the industrial (and post-industrial) landscape of Scotland, about the conscious and (rather literally) unconscious mind, about society and the self, about the meanings of life and death. And if all that sounds confusing, both writers also share an ability to make their complicated and philosophically challenging narratives easy and enjoyable to follow. Both are vivid and sharp, both sweeten the pill with humour and good old-fashioned entertainment.
But while it’s easy to point out all these similarities, there are also important differences between the novels. Lanark is darker, denser, more difficult, more obsessive, more mystical. It follows the railroad to death – whereas The Bridge follows it back to life. They may be two sides of the coin, but they show very different faces.
It’s worth saying at this point that you don’t need to know about Lanark to read The Bridge. I’d recommend that anyone who enjoys The Bridge reads Gray – but only because it’s a wonderful and (as Banks demonstrated) inspirational novel. The Bridge is quite capable of standing on its own and generating its own ideas, impressions and points of interest. At which point, I could start listing them myself, but I thought it would be more interesting to ask you what you think the book is about, whether you have read it with or without Lanark – and what happened to poor old Aberlaine Arrol?
• Buy The Bridge from the Guardian bookshop
