From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Friday, May 11, 2001 10:42 PM Twentieth post Metamorphosis: Miocene This time the dream that starts the chapter is Orr's dream of part of the narrator's real life. There has been an inversion of reality and fantasy, or a double negative; a dream character's dreams are actually reality. A brief scene starts with the narrator reading a political poem to his friend, to see if he likes part of it. His friend asks if it's new. The narrator says no, it's ancient, but that he was thinking he might try to get some printed. A funny scene, and one which subtly equates the narrator and Banks himself. After all, Banks was the one who wrote the poem in the book, probably a long time ago by the time he wrote _The Bridge_, and now he has gotten it printed -- in _The Bridge_. I wonder whether the narrator (first name Alexander, last name unknown at this point in the book) is sort of an alternate Banks, a path that he didn't take. I can easily imagine that Banks might be good at enginneering, and that he might have started his education with something like it; if he had stuck with that, and not become a writer of fiction, is the narrator the person he imagines he would have turned in to? I've previously commented that a lot of the narrator's past sounds like thinly reworked autobiography; if this idea is psychologically true, then the narrator would share Banks' personal history up to a certain point. In fact, this point may be almost precisely locatable; on pg. 85 of my edition, in Triassic: "He decided to drop Geology; while everyone else was doing Eng Lit or Sociology [...] he would do something useful. Some of Andrea's friends tried to persuade him to do English [...] No, he was determined to do something which would be of real use to the world." The road not taken, eh? I seem to recall that there is a Banks novel that focuses heavily on this theme; I can't recall which at present. At any rate, Orr wakes up and tells us that he's now with a Field Marshal and his bandits; he raids his dreams for stories that he can tell them for a living. They burn books for warmth, they are cannibals and casual killers. Orr tells them the story of a boy whose dad had a pigeon loft and a man who was never happier than when his marriage proposal was turned down at the top of a pigeon-loft folly. (Yeah, sure. Incredibly happy.) The Field Marshal isn't impressed, so Orr tells them/us the story of how he got there, starting with his swoon at the end of the last chapter. After the swoon, Orr wakes up on a new train; he aches in various places, including the old circular pain in his chest. "I was to be a waiter; one who waited" he says. The train contained officials from the Republic on a peace mission; he was drafted as an assistant to the head waiter, there because he can't understand their language and therefore can't reveal their secrets. Of course there is an obvious second meaning of him being forced to wait for something else to happen; maybe he's given up on the dream of The Bridge and wants to wake up, but his body has not yet recovered enough. The train has cars with anti-aircraft guns; they are going towards a war, and more and more of the train starts to be replaced with armored carriages holding troops, artillery, anti-aircraft guns, and the like. Orr now served only military officers. They are attacked by planes; the anti-aircraft guns drive them off or they drive the train into tunnels. They start going through an area with many active volcanoes and lava flows. They are attacked in the midst of an avalanche of boulders, probably set up as an ambush; the Field Marshal's men loot the train and kill everyone but Orr. "Language saved me again"; Orr speaks the same language as the bandits, and the Field Marshal laughs at him and decides that he'll keep him alive as a valet and to tell stories. The Field Marshal takes his handkerchief. They set out on the bandits' smaller train. (I should point out that language was a complicated issue on The Bridge as well. There, Orr spoke the general language that everyone spoke, the language of administrators, but most people had a second specialized language for their profession, and Orr understood none of them. That was why he couldn't understand many of the answers to his questions about The Bridge.) The Field Marshal is sort of a third-world cliche; he wears garish uniforms, throws captured soldiers into boiling mud for sport, or ties them to the front of his train and runs them down, and keeps a dozen pigs in luxurious state carriages while keeping his human captures in cattle trucks. Later he drags a guy out of the boiling mud, lets the mud harden, and makes a statue out of him. He likes to ask Orr if Orr likes their little games, knowing that Orr has to lie and say that he does, or be killed. Three medium bombers (an allusion to the three planes of The Bridge) bomb the train; the Field Marshal, Orr, and then men survive in a ruined city, where the men hunt and eat the inhabitants. This brings us back to the beginning of Orr's part of this chapter. The Field Marshal decides to play a sexual game with Orr; he has Orr put on a black dress, and gives him a machine gun that he says is loaded. The Field Marshal wants Orr to poke the machine gun up the Marshal's bum while the Marshal mounts a pig. Orr figures that the bullets in the machine gun have been emptied of powder; he thinks that the Field Marshal is waiting for Orr to pull the trigger, after which the Marshal will have the fun of killing him with some weapon hidden under the pillow. So Orr crushes the Marshal's skull with the machine gun instead. Then he escapes, taking various valuables including his handkerchief. End of chapter. Well, what was this for? The Field Marshal and his milleu never return; the whole episode is contained within this chapter. In the final conflict with the Marshal, Orr narrates: "I detest this man. But neither of us is stupid." A rather out-of-character sentiment, wouldn't you think? I can imagine Orr thinking "I detest this man" but "neither of us is stupid" has rather a James Bond quality that seems unlike the Orr of the rest of the book. In fact, Orr has no real personality whatsoever in this chapter. In theory, this is supposed to be because he is totally focussed on survival, in fact, I suspect that it's because this little chunk of story could be about anyone, and it's just stuck here with Orr as the protagonist because Orr is in the rest of the book. This is, in fact, the Obligatory Deadly Vengeance scene in this book. Nearly every Banks book has an Obligatory Deadly Vengeance scene (ODV, for short). The ODV has the following invarient structure: 1. The protagonist is presented as, ordinary, a good guy. 2. But there is a villain. We know he's villianous because he does exaggeratedly villainous things, far worse than most real-life evil people do. 3. After we've been regaled with stories of how bad the villain is, the protagonist kills the villain, often in some "poetic justice" fashion, often with torture. 4. But the protagonist's murder or torture/murder is fine, justifiable, and good -- because the bad guy is such a villain. I have no idea why the ODV is there, really, but Banks loves it. It exists in Use of Weapons, Excession, Inversions, Look To Windward, and in lesser form in Player of Games and The Crow Road. _Complicity_ is based on it. It's probably in more Banks books that I haven't read. What are the consequences of the ODV? Well, Banks has political goals for his work, and the ODV directly detracts from those goals by making Banks' readers feel like torture and/or execution are the right way to handle these kind of people. In real life, people with Banks' politics don't go on lone killer vengeance sprees. They start human rights groups. And by doing so, they win at least limited victories. Those who do decide that killing the kulaks is the way to go end up, if they happen to win, by creating regimes that are worse than the ones they overthrew. Does anyone think that South Africa would be in better shape now if, instead of having a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they had a lot of firing squads? But who could argue with killing people like the Field Marshal? Well, the reason you can't argue is because Banks has written them that way. They have no humanity whatsoever, and are furnished with over-the-top atrocity stories designed to elicit exactly the feeling that this person must be destroyed at any cost. Remember, none of these people ever really existed, so their purpose within the book is simply to elicit this feeling. So why does Banks do this so regularly? Well, the only answer would involve guessing at motives from a distance, which is of course difficult and dicey. I'd guess that he writes these scenes for the same reason, whatever that is, as he writes all of the male characters who are dealing with power-fueled sex fantasies in his books. Surely he can't beleive in this kind of thing for intellectual reasons, or that these are simply fine dramatic scenes, or really think that putting in an ODV helps his readers confront these issues in some way. The ODV exists to present only one reasonable solution; they are not there to cause the reader to think about "these issues", because they don't cause the reader to think. In any event, the ODV is the biggest thing holding Banks back from really top-class writing. Here it's caused him to drop irrelevant material into a perfectly good, even efficient story structure; in other books it destroys the work entirely. I suspect that a fondness for the ODV is what causes some people to inexplicably put _Inversions_ at the top of their Banks book list; that book is one long, twisted fantasy in which the female characters exist mostly to be raped or threatened with rape. Banks' later Culture books, _Inversions_ and _Look To Windward_, both show an increasing fondness for the ODV and are among his worst as a result; his best book, _Use of Weapons_, works in part because the protagonist and the writer and the reader all *know* that the ODV is wrong even as it's being committed, yet understand in some other than comic-book way the flaw in the protagonist's character that causes him to do these things. I really hope that when Banks returns to writing from his vacation that he will have thought about this. If any of the people out there who say that they know him are reading this, ask him about it, would you?