“There are hundreds of thoughts per every word spoken, and that’s if they’re spoken at all.”
After two international bestsellers—The Messenger (2002) and The Book Thief (2005)—author Markus Zusak hunkered down for thirteen years to write his next book, Bridge of Clay. The novel is a whirlwind, told completely out of order, jumping around in time as we inhabit the lives of five brothers who must raise themselves after losing their parents. As the complex narrative unhinges the reader from the timeline, Zusak infiltrates and illuminates a series of poignant moments in the lives of the Dunbar family. Elegiac prose and linguistic self-indulgence abound, nearly drowning out the story—but the excesses and intentional obscurities serve to develop a wonderful texture. After a confounding introduction to the family, the book serves up an extended series of emotionally resonant scenes, turning the simple story into a meditation on adolescence, human connection, parenthood, creativity, exile, and masculinity.
The narrative leaves the readers guessing for quite a while, as the book begins with the narrator, Matthew Dunbar, announcing that he is telling the story out of order. “In the beginning there was one murderer, one mule and one boy, but this isn’t the beginning, it’s before it, it’s me, and I’m Matthew, and here I am, in the kitchen, in the night—the old river mouth of light—and I’m punching and punching away.”
We learn of the Dunbar boys—(from oldest to youngest) Matthew, Rory, Henry, Clay, and Tommy—who are abandoned by their grief-stricken father when their mother succumbs to cancer after several years of fighting it bravely. The main story ostensibly focuses on Clay’s pact with the boys’ father Michael to build a bridge, but of course that isn’t really what the novel is about. Zusak approaches the story from a unique perspective, introducing themes and motifs subtlety, and gradually folding them into the cyclical narrative as we move between characters, between eras, and between mental and physical realities. The story is told by Matthew, but he tells us of things that could only have been related to him later. His tone is familiar (referring to “you” the reader on several occasions), even as he tries to formally document his family’s story of redemption and reconciliation.
A fictionalized book titled The Quarryman documenting the life of Michelangelo, as well as The Iliad and The Odyssey serve as touchstones for the Dunbars as they find meaning in creative pursuits. Several films are also explicitly called out, including My Life As A Dog, City of God, Mad Max 2, and Bachelor Party. Art and memory overlap with the present reality, and we begin to understand the profundity of communication both with and without language. Michael used to paint his ex-wife, but never painted Penny—the mother of the five boys—who grew up in the Eastern Bloc having her fingers slapped as her father instructed her on the piano. Her father selflessly forces her to flee, and she never sees him again, but she teaches her boys piano and reads to them from the works of Homer just like her father did for her. Michael finds meaning in his parenthood, becoming a role model to his children, and the scenes of the boys’ home life with their parents are some of the most touching.
Zusak gives his characters nicknames—‘The Mistake Maker,’ ‘The Broken-Nosed Bride,’ ‘The Murderer’—that seem overly simple at first, but allow the reader to feel intimate with the characters. The story has a tangible feel to it, leaving out many factual details in favor of impressions and runs of idiosyncratic language. There is so much going on within the character’s minds as they process emotions, learn to find themselves in their pursuits, and use paintings, literature, and music as metaphorical bridges between one another. The book eventually builds up a locomotive momentum as we suffer along with the Dunbar boys in the present and learn of the disparate and chance threads of the past that eventually wove themselves together and frayed apart again. As we near the end of the novel, familiar territory is covered over and over, elucidating previously unexplored corners each time, until the it truly feels that the whole thing is kind of happening concurrently, like it really needs to be dropped into the reader’s lap all at once instead of told chronologically.
The main cast of characters is unevenly developed in the best way; Zusak makes each of them unique, favoring development of emotional and mental states, and only selectively rambling on about copious factual details when it reinforces the emotional heft of the narrative. Matthew, the lynchpin of the story, begins documenting his family history after digging up grandmother’s typewriter—referred to as “the old TW”—in the opening chapters. Through the eyes of these boys who grow into men, Zusak excellently portrays the fickle feelings of sibling affection—in alternating scenes the brothers will either beat the pulp out of one another or watch as someone else does, then be guardian and friend the next.
Zusak can get carried away with his poetic writing style at times, but it is on point often enough that I can forgive him when it gets frivolous.
He, as much as anyone, knows who and why and what we are:
A family of ramshackle tragedy.
A comic book kapow of boys and blood and beasts.
Zusack also has a great sense of humor. In one scene, young Rory spilled soup on himself at dinner, Michael tells them all to eat without their shirts on so as to avoid staining them.
For a whole summer, we ate like that, our T-shirts heaped near the toaster. To be fair, though, and to Michael Dunbar’s credit, from the second time onwards, he took his own shirt off with us. Tommy, who was still in that beautiful phase when kids speak totally unfiltered, shouted, “Hey! Hey, Dad! What are you doing here in just your nipples?”
As with much of the best fiction, the takeaways can vary based on the reader, and is even a mystery to the author while they are writing. Quoth Zusak: “I’m writing a book called Bridge of Clay—about a boy building a bridge and wanting it to be perfect. He wants to achieve greatness with this bridge, and the question is whether it will survive when the river floods. That’s all I can say about it for now—not out of secrecy, but you just don’t know what direction a book is going to take, no matter how well you’ve planned.” That was in 2008, and eight years later the novel was still not finished, and Zusak considered how different he was compared to the person who had written the beginning. For me, the ultimate thrust of the book is the act of leaving one’s own unique thumbprint on the history of mankind—through music, writing, building, raising children, teaching, loving, helping.
Sources:
Zusak, Markus. “The author of The Book Thief explains why failure is his best friend, and why all writers tend to be loners” by Sarah Kinson. The Guardian. 28 March 2008.
Zusak, Markus. “The Book Thief 10 Years Later: Markus Zusak Reflects on His Iconic Novel” by Sean Edgar. Paste. 14 March 2016.