The Bridge: From the Novel by Iain Banks with Soundtrack [Audiobook] [Hardcover]

'Represents significant progress in the flowering of an exceptional talent...a totally absorbing read' THE TIMES 'Iain Banks of THE WASP FACTORY eclipses that sensational debut...a real dazzler' DAILY MAIL It's compulsive reading and highly recommended. SUNDAY TODAY A stunning book, Banks' powerful imagination is joined to a rare ability to be truly funny while exploring a nightmare world. SUNDAY TIMES --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'Iain Banks of THE WASP FACTORY eclipses that sensational debut...a real dazzler' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

* Iain Banks' THE BRIDGE - 'the flowering of an exceptional talent' (THE TIMES). --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

The man who wakes up in the extraordinary world of a bridge has amnesia, and his doctor doesn't seem to want to cure him. Does it matter? Exploring the bridge occupies most of his days. But at night there are his dreams. Dreams in which desperate men drive sealed carriages across barren mountains to a bizarre rendezvous; an illiterate barbarian storms an enchanted tower under a stream of verbal abuse; and broken men walk forever over bridges without end, taunted by visions of a doomed sexuality. Lying in bed unconscious after an accident wouldn't be much fun, you'd think. Oh yes? It depends who and what you've left behind. Which is the stranger reality, day or night? Frequently hilarious and consistently disturbing, THE BRIDGE is a novel of outrageous contrasts, constructed chaos and elegant absurdities. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A man lies in a coma after a near fatal accident. His body broken, his memory vanished, he finds himself in the surreal world of the bridge – a world where dreams and fantasy, past and future fuse.

Who is this man?

Where is he?

Is he more dead than alive?

Or has he never been so alive before?

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, THE WASP FACTORY, in 1984. He has been a hugely popular writer of fiction ever since, and, as Iain M Banks, of science fiction. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

One
The dark station, shuttered and empty, echoed to the distant, fading whistle of the departing train. In the grey evening light the whistle sounded damp and cold, as though the cloud of exhausted steam producing it had imparted some of its own character to the noise. The mountains, covered in their close, dark weave of trees, absorbed the sound like heavy cloth soaking up drizzle; only the faintest of echoes came back, reflected from where crags and cliffs and slopes of jumbled scree and fallen boulders broke the conformity of forest.
When the noise of the whistle had died away, I stood for a while, facing the deserted station, reluctant to turn to the silent carriage behind me. I listened, trying to catch some last hint of the engine's own busy noise as it steamed down the steep valley; I wanted to hear its panting breath, the busy clatter of its pistoned hearts, the chatter of its valves and slides. But though no other sound disturbed the valley's still air, I could hear nothing of the train or its engine; they were gone. Above, the steeply pitched roofs and thick chimneys of the station stood out against the overcast sky, black on grey. Some wisps of steam or smoke, only slowly dissipating in the valley's moist, chill air, hung above the black slates and soot-darkened bricks. An odour of burned coal and the damp, used smell of steam seemed to cling to my clothes.
I turned to look at the carriage. It was sealed, locked from the outside and fastened with thick leather straps. It was black-painted, funereal. In the traces two nervous mares stamped at the leaf-strewn road leading from the station. They shook their dark heads and rolled their huge eyes. Their harnesses clinked and jingled, rocking the carriage behind them slightly, and from their flared nostrils issued clouds of steam; equine impressions of the departed train.
I inspected the carriage's shuttered windows and locked doors, testing the tight leather strapping and pulling on the metal handles, then I climbed to the driver's seat and took up the reins. I stared at the narrow track leading into the forest. I reached for the whip, hesitated, then put it back, unwilling to disturb the valley's atmosphere of silence. I took hold of the wooden brake lever. In some strange inversion of physiology, my hands were moist while my mouth was dry. The carriage shook, perhaps due to the restless movements of the horses.
The sky above was dull and grey and uniform. The higher peaks around me were obscured somewhere above the tree line by the smooth mat of cloud; their jagged summits and sharp ridges seemingly levelled by the soft, clinging vapour. The light was at once shadowless and pervasively dim. I took out my watch and realised that even if all went well I was unlikely to finish my journey in daylight. I patted the pocket containing my flint and tinder; I could make my own light when that around me failed. The carriage rocked again, and the horses stamped and stirred, craning their necks round, eye-whites bulging.
I could delay no further. I released the brake and urged the pair into a trot. The carriage lurched and creaked, rumbling heavily over the rutted road, away from the dark station and into the darker forest.

The road climbed through the trees, past small clearings and over hollow-bellied wooden bridges. In the darkness and the silence of the forest, the torrents beneath the bridges were rushing oases of pale, white light and chaotic noise.
The air grew steadily colder as we climbed. The mares' breath wreathed back around me, thick with the smell of their sweat. The perspiration on my own brow and hands was chill. I reached into my coat for my gloves, and my hand brushed against the thick grip of the revolver in my jacket. I fastened my gloves, drew my coat closer about me, and as I tightened the belt of the garment, was impelled to look again at the bindings and fastenings securing the carriage behind me. In the gloom, however, it was impossible to tell whether the straps still held or not.
The way steepened between the thinning trees; the mares laboured up the rutted track, into the lower reaches of the dark grey overcast, wisps of barely seen cloud mingling with and absorbing their ghostly white breath. The valley beneath was a formless black pit; not a single light, no fire or movement, and no sound that I could detect issued from its depths. A groan seemed to come from the carriage as we rolled into the enveloping clouds; it lurched as a wheel struck and rolled over a rock in the track. I patted the pistol concealed within my jacket, determining that the groan I had heard was simply that of the carriage's wooden couplings flexing against each other. The cloud grew thicker. The small, stunted trees just visible at the sides of the rough track looked like the dwarfish, deformed sentinels of some phantom fortress.
I stopped in the mist on a level length of the track. The carriage lamps produced, when the flames had steadied, two cones of light which did little to illuminate the ground far beyond the sweat-slicked, tossing heads of the mares, but the lamps' hiss was somehow purposeful and comforting. In their glare, I again checked the carriage bindings. Some had loosened, doubtless due to the road's many corrugations and stony obstacles. I turned the lamps in their sockets, pointing them forward again once my inspection was completed. Their diffused beams encountered the damp vapour like contrary shadows, obscuring more than they revealed. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.