From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Wednesday, April 25, 2001 6:18 PM Second post Metaphormosis: One This chapter begins with the narrator's vision of the dark station mentioned at the end of the introduction; a dream that the narrator is the coachman for a sealed carriage that he has to bring somewhere. He is blocked by another carriage, with another driver who makes every motion at the same time as he does. Then we find out that this is a dream that the narrator is describing to his therapist; actually, that he's made up the dream because he can't really dream anything. "I guess it means I'm frightened of something" the narrator snarls later. Frightened of what? Well, as far as I can guess, the sealed carriage is his conciousness of the reality that he is actually lying, near death, in the hospital, he is not actually in good health and talking to his therapist. He's blocking himself from acknowledging it and trapping himself in his internal vision, as a way of blocking out pain and trauma. The therapist scene quickly leads into some basics: the narrator is on a giant bridge, over the ocean. Everyone lives on this bridge. He's an amnesiac, so he's been given the name John Orr. (Orr because he was found in the sea near the bridge with a giant O-shaped bruise on his chest and broken ribs; the bruise is a recurring image. It's actually from where the steering wheel hit his chest in the car crash, presumably.) The therapist, Dr. Joyce, is clearly a part of the narrator that's trying to get him to acknowledge his real situation, right from the start. Here's a precis of their actual situation, disguised as them talking about Orr's made-up dream; "[Dr. Joyce is] looking very suspicious (as I've said, with good reason). 'You wake up?' he says. I try to sound as annoyed as I can: 'Damn it man, I can't control what I dream.' (A lie.)" Typical Banks: he says right at the start what is going on. The narrator has not really woken up, he is still dreaming, and he can really control what he dreams, but he's lying about that to himself. A bit later it gets even more blatent, the doctor says that the bridge might be a dream and asks Orr how he'd know if it wasn't. Orr asks him back the same question and Dr. Joyce says "No point asking me that; I'd be part of the dream." True. But at any rate, the doctor says that Orr probably can't tell him what the dream means, and it's clear that Orr isn't ready to leave his created world. The bridge is a bit surreal. The therapist has two patients, one of whom thinks he's various items of furniture and has a policeman sitting on him, and the other a window washer who never comes in; there is a tax on wheels, so most people can only afford monocycles which crash often; everything has a kind of mock-Victorian flavor with giant elevators that have musicians and elevator operators. Orr has supposedly been trying to find out who built the bridge, what it is for, and what it is a bridge between, but all of his queries get lost or are answered in a language he can't read. The records are supposed to have been kept in the third city library, which has been lost. That has a definite flavor of images that will appear again in _Feersum Endgin_. What is the bridge between? He knows it's between the City and the Kingdom, but not any more. But that's actually a very good hint for the reader: the City is the City of Man, and the Kingdom is the Kingdom of Heaven. In other words, they represent Life and Death, and he's on a bridge hanging halfway between them, and could go in either direction. The Dr. shows Orr the bridge, and we get the first description of it. It's red-painted. Finally, at the end of the chapter we have the first intrusion of reality. Orr turns on his TV, and instead of a program it shows a man lying in a coma in a hospital bed -- clearly the narrator himself. Noteably, the visitor's seat next to him is unoccupied. The man in the bed doesn't look like Orr; in addition to his obvious wounds, he is short, ordinary-looking, and has a bald patch, and we've already gotten the impression that Orr is good-looking. Clearly the narrator has created a fantasy counterpart that is himself as he would like to be, not as he is. Unlike, say, Stanislaw Lem in _The Futurological Congress_, or Philip K. Dick in most of his books, Banks isn't setting up a normal apparent reality that later catastrophically fails. Reality is intruding from the start, right from the first chapter. That, to me, indicates a certain basic optimism; we're not supposed to thrash around with a Philip K. Dick character whose world is shattering; we're supposed to inhabit someone's head as he puts himself back together.