From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Thursday, May 10, 2001 9:29 PM Nineteenth post Metamorphosis: Oligocene (part 2 of 2) The chapter begins with musings by the narrator on eyes silting up, pretend snowflake globes, how we are igneous in youth, metamorphic in our prime, and sedimentary in dotage, and how we are the gathered silt of ancient star explosions. The narrator's half awake, he thinks "Cities and Kingdoms and Bridges and Towers; I'm sure I'm heading for them all." Note that I haven't been able to find anywhere an indication of which direction this last train that the narrator takes to escape is going in. Maybe the City/Kingdom symbolism no longer matters so much now that he's decided to leave. Then, with the narrator half awake, he sees the three planes come, flying alongside in the same direction. Now the Bridge has anti-aircraft defenses, a hail of shells is fired at the planes and bursts of smoke explode all around them. The planes look invulnerable, but after a while one is hit in the tail. Its tail disappears, consumed by smoke, it drops back till it's flying evenly alongside the train. The gray smoke eats its way up the plane; the plane still flies along, though it shouldn't be able to, until it's a flying engine, then a propeller, then gone. Why the symbolism of one plane being destroyed? I'm not entirely sure, but I have an idea, supported by something I remember from a later part of the book; there are three men in Andrea's life -- her father, Gustave, and the narrator. In the last chapter, her father died. Therefore the first of the planes has been shot down. An alternate symbolism might be the division of a person's life into youth, adulthood, and dotage that the narrator made earlier. In this symbolism, his decision to leave The Bridge indicates that he's finally growing up, that his youth is gone. Threes are such common symbolic numbers that it's possible to come up with many other meanings -- such as, as someone else suggested, it represents him dealing with his id, leaving his ego and superego to continue -- but I like my first interpretation best. On the journey, Orr has recurring dreams of a life lived on land (i.e. the sections describing the narrator's life), and wonders if those are reality. He has stowed away on an empty train, drinking from the washbasins but having nothing to eat for days. It gets warmer and sunnier as he goes, the skins of the people he glimpses outside become darker. Then one night, he realizes that he has reached land, a forest. The train enters a sprawling town the next day (the City?) and Orr hides in a cupboard, but he's found the day after that. He's locked up, but fed, they clean his clothes and he gets back the handkerchief that Aroll had monogrammed, and "on which she had left a smudged red image of her lips" quite clean. Orr has other dreams besides "the recurring one of the man in the severely beautiful city" -- i.e. the narrator -- there are also brief allusions to the two carriages facing each other, and the two ships firing on each other, the first two dreams that he made up for Dr. Joyce. Orr is brought to a cold, concentric place, a circular island in the middle of a circular sea, with a causeway dividing the sea, called The Eye of God. Here he's going to be put in a dormitory with a hundred other men. And here is where I would think that Banks' editor would have raised some strong objections. He's bringing us into another dream realm, similar to The Bridge, but not actually it. Why? We are three quarters of the way through the book, and most of the remainder of the pages will be about the narrator's real life or about continuations of previous dreams, the scenes in the new setting really take up only a few pages. In my opinion, none of the succeeding non-Bridge Orr sequences are worthwhile; they add little and detract from the symbolism of The Bridge itself. After all, Orr's left The Bridge, you'd think he'd have reached reality. But instead we have to go through more little bits and pieces full of newly introduced, unnamed dream characters, none of them the ones that we already know something about. Ostensibly, as we find out later, this new dream area may be there because they moved the narrator and they are trying out new drugs on the narrator's physical body, but this seems like a very weak rationale; you'd think that drugs that affect his mind enough to keep him from dreaming about The Bridge coherently would keep him from dreaming any coherent dream world. And Banks didn't have to write these new drugs into the plot in any event. I think this is the weakest part of the book, one of the elements that keeps it from being a first-rank masterpiece, and possibly a reason why I've seen other people write that the book is so hard to understand; these parts don't need to be there and never really gell. They have every appearance of being written when Banks was first thinking of the book and not excluded later when he'd figured out what structure the story should actually take, rather like various parts of _Excession_, or the bit of a following story grafted on to the end of _Use of Weapons_ (a much better editing job there since it only suggests another story, rather than actually being one). Maybe they are supposed to make the book less of a neat puzzle and more like messy real life, but I don't think they succeed in this regard; after all they aren't real life. But they are there, so I suppose I have to go through them, though if any part of this series of posts feels dutiful rather than fun, this is it. The Eye of God contains the Republic, it seems both run down and full of energy, and there are immaculate palaces and temples of an earlier age among gray buildings, and a cemetary of millions of identical white pillars. Orr is put to sweeping leaves from the paths of a part even when there are no leaves to sweep; it's the law. He can speak to few people, but those who do understand him are delighted to find someone else speaking their language. Everyone seems like a prisoner or a guard. Then he dreams that he's lost half his weight during the night and that the city is being bombed. When he wakes he finds that everyone in the city has such dreams, they may be sparked by such an attack in the past that he sees signs of on the buildings. Orr talks too much about the Bridge and the secret police pick him up and beat him, they take him to a prison headquarters where the chief explains that the prison is a bunch of rotating cylinders sunk into the rock, like a lock. Orr blacks out and wakes up on another train. See what I mean? Pretty utterly worthless if you ask me; who cares about a completely new dream context at this stage?