Bridge of Clay

Markus Zusak

MacMillan

Otago Daily Times, November 24th 2018

Fifteen years after the success of The Book Thief, Markus Zusac has returned to print with a luminous exploration of family, friendship, loss, reconciliation and the way in which boys and brothers love.

On the face of it the Dunbars are a study in contrasts: Responsible Matthew, Rory the invincible; the human ball-and chain, Henry the money-maker, Clayton, who was born smiling, and pet-collector Thomas. Holding them together is their mother, Penny, who mediates in their squabbles, teaches them piano, and introduces them to the delights of Homer. 

Her death tears the heart out of the family, and when their father Michael flees rather than live with her unbearable absence, the boys are left to fend for themselves. As the eldest, Matthew takes on the role of breadwinner and head of the household, but in many ways it is Clay who takes responsibility for the family’s soul because he is the only one who knows the totality of his mother’s life. Not just the oft-repeated anecdotes from her childhood, and her first meeting with their father, but also darker memories she has shared with nobody else. 

Each of boys deals with his grief in their own way, inhabiting their defining characteristics a little more intensely. For Clay, the boy who fights but never to win, this means pushing his body to the limits of endurance and, when their father unexpectedly reappears asking for help with a mysterious and seemingly futile engineering project – the erection of a bridge over a dry riverbed – Clay agrees, despite knowing his brothers will punish him for his betrayal.  In his self-contained silence he gathers his parent’s stories together, building literal and figurative bridges between past and present, life and death, father and sons, and passes them to Matthew, the novel’s narrator, to put into words.

Details of family history and Penelope’s long, slow dying alternate with details of life in the aftermath of her passing. It also follows Clay’s loving and conscientiously platonic relationship with his neighbour Carey Novac, whom we soon realise he is also destined to lose.

It would be easy for such a story to become a study in darkness, but rather than dwell on despair the novel abounds with beginnings; A dog, a snake, and a typewriter buried in a backyard, a mis-delivered piano, a boy on a roof and a girl with a toaster, a mule walking on water.

It is also extraordinary its exploration the way in which men convert feeling into physical action. Far from being stereotypical examples of emotionally stunted manhood, the Dunbars’ home is a culturally and intellectually rich environment: Clay and Carey share a love of horseracing but also spend hours discussing Michelangelo, Penelope was a talented pianist, Michael once aspired to a career in art, and the boys share their home with a menagerie of animals named from the Iliad. Despite this, rather than express their love and grief through words, the boys turn to running, fighting, game-playing, physical construction and petty theft as means of emotional outlet and of communication.

This same pattern – a surface simplicity concealing rich complexity of thought and structure is evident in the writing. Matthew’s voice is linguistically simple but rich in allusion and classical reference, with a lyric quality more akin to poetry than prose.

“Many considered us tearaways.

Barbarians.

Mostly they were right:

Our mother was dead.

Our father had fled…

…for the five of us, life always went on.”

Some reviewers have criticised the structural and symbolic complexity of Bridge of Clay as unnecessary and over-engineered, but for me Zusak’s celebration of survival is the most beautiful thing that I have read for many years.