Now this is a little gem, a book I heard about a little while ago and finally got around to buying and reading and enjoying immensely very recently. 'Bridge of Birds' is a 'Novel of an Ancient China that never was', a darkly comic but enthralling short fantasy that grabs you and finally only lets you go after a quest hundreds of years long is coincidentally cracked by our merely mortal protagonists. You see, it's a story about a quest for elderly sage Li Kao (who has a self-confessed slight flaw to his character) and his youthful client Number Ten Ox, as they desperately try to find a cure for a plague that has struck the children of Ox's village. Unfortunately the plague has but one cure, a mythical great root of power, that Li and Ox set out to find.
The double quest structure is fascinating, as it combines the secondary but higher mystery/puzzle with the primary simpler adventure, where the mystery itself is slowly being unveiled and then unravelled over the course of the narrative. The second hidden quest is of grand, epic and heavenly scope but is constantly counterbalanced by the earthly objective of the first. And if the second quest involves murdering evil immortal and invulnerable dukes, restoring long lost amnesiac goddesses to heaven, and at least one axe wielding (but lovable) maniacal killer then all the better. The twinned quests are beautifully intertwined, to the point that I didn't even see the puzzle solution coming, even though other readers probably do.
It's always nice to find a book that's funny and yet manages to tell a story. There aren't that many. Comedic classics like 'Three Men In A Boat' and 'The Ascent Of Rum Doodle' don't have this level of plot and story, nor the wicked sense of wit that Hughart instills into the project. Apparently he became disillusioned with the publishing process after completing the two sequels of 'Bridge Of Birds' and never wrote again. At least he stopped before polluting the legacy of this little masterwork as so many authors do, although I can't be definitive on that without reading the sequels.
This piece has run rather short, as if the swift reading time has eliminated a lot of the detail I could have written about. Perhaps 'Bridge of Birds' is a classic example of my 'Little and Big Principle': The theory that stories and films that capture both small- and large-scale ideas are inherently more appreciable and fascinating than things that only focus on one. This novel is simultaneously entirely about its narrator Number Ten Ox and his travails in saving his village, as well as an epic heavenly tale spanning centuries of time, several ghosts, numerous coincidences and an epic mislead of the first order.
You're probably better off reading it for yourself. Everyone, go and read 'Bridge of Birds' if you can. It's a bit sexist, but it's also a surprising first novel and something quite unprecedented in my own experience. I'm hoping Robert Sheckley will be just as good.
O.
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