A man in a coma after crashing on the Forth Bridge dreams his way back towards waking. Or does he? It's not a question of a twist: we know going in this is a coma dream. We also know that there is nothing as dull as listening to other people's dreams (our own are so much more interesting.) But Iain Banks is the dream-master, and this, in essence, is a fictional world within a fictional world, an idea made explicit from the start as dream-man invents dreams to recount to his dream therapist who is treating his amnesia because he doesn't dream. Dream man was fished from the waters below an apparently endless bridge with no memories of who he is or where he came from. In treatment, he lives a more or less blissful life under the benevolent rule of the bridge, enjoying a mildly hedonistic lifestyle punctuated with generally unsatisfactory visits to his dream therapist. He has begun a desultory investigation into the bridge itself, with the only result a better understanding of how little he understands.

So is he finding his way back to wakefulness? Or is he finally living the life he always wanted?

At the heart of the book is a love story, or an attempt to write a mature, modern (for the late 80s early 90s modern) love story devoid of the usual conventions but with the same universal emotional core. Our couple are modern, well-educated, liberal. He's climbing out of the working and into the middle class, an rationalist, materialist engineer, she comes from moderate wealth, an intellectual, a linguist and if not a believer then less committed to rationalism then he is. All these things subtly and indirectly provide the raw materials that go into constructing the Bridge, and it is through all this the man must find his way and decide if that's a life he wants back.

Brilliantly written, this still dazzles, even as it prefigures the dazzling baroque world-building of the Culture and the tales of Scottish adults and how their lives were shaped by their experiences as youths. It also firmly sets out the notion that though Banks, and most of his protagonists, firmly and categorically do not believe in God, the human imagination that produced Him is a mighty one indeed.