THE BRIDGE was published in 1986.
His body broken, his memory vanished, a man finds himself in the surreal world of the bridge where his doctor doesn’t seem to want to cure him.
This is a world free of the usual constraints of time and space, a world where dream 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?
Iain said of The Bridge, “Once I had the initial idea it fell together very quickly after that. It only took a couple of days to get the bones worked out. The real breakthrough with that came when, after I had the idea of dreams and the bridge and the Forth Bridge all put together, I was doodling on a piece of paper and started drawing the diamond-shaped bits of the bridge as it actually looks and thought, aha, there’s your structure.”
He added, “The Forth Bridge must have had an effect on me. I grew up with it outside my bedroom window. [It] dominated the school playground throughout my early childhood. This might well have given me a taste for large, inspiring engineering. I moved back to the same village a few years ago, so I still see it every day, all mile-and-a-quarter of it is floodlit now so it even looks enormously impressive at night, too. I love its distant grace, its close-up massiveness, the colour of its hollow red bones against the stark clarity of a blue summer sky and its veiled bulk sieving the mists and clouds swirling above the winter river.”
Iain again, “Never mind this urban realist stuff; I’ve come to accept that – along with a couple of my friends – I live in Chocolate Box Scotland. I’ll explain. One of us lives within spitting distance of Eilean Donan castle, another has the Glenfinnan monument practically in the back garden, and I live within yards of the Forth Bridge. So there; three places in the top four most photographed sites in Scotland. All we need is somebody with a flat overlooking Edinburgh castle and we’d have the set.
“I spent most of my childhood in North Queensferry, leaving when I was nine. I remember feeling proud that I lived in a place so locatable. You wouldn’t otherwise expect people to know where a wee village like the Ferry was, but everyone had heard of the Forth Bridge; like the Queen Mary or the Hoover dam, it was on everybody’s list of Modern Wonders of the World.
“It might not be quite so world-renowned these days – there are bigger bridges, certainly – but it’s still massively beautiful, and it’s even being looked after properly (what looks like half the scaffolding in Scotland is encrusted around it as the moment, and there are clouds of rusty dust floating off it as I write – all that’s got to be doing the old thing some good.
“Perhaps even more impressive is simply that it still works; this is a complex and highly exposed structure designed and built in the nineteenth century that’s going to go on carrying goods and people well into the twenty-first. So spare a thought for it next time you cross it, and one for the men who designed and built it, and the fifty-seven who died. This thing is a civil engineering structure, a monument, a symbol and a work of art.”
“I think The Bridge is my best book, the most complicated and bravura.”
Asked about comparisons between The Bridge and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, Iain said “I was absolutely knocked out by Lanark. I think it’s the best in Scottish literature this century. It opened my eyes. I had forgotten what you could do – you can be self-referential, you can muck about with different voices, characters, time-streams, whatever. Lanark had a huge effect on The Bridge. I’m quite happy to acknowledge that debt.”