Transcending humanness
This doorstop of a book is an absolute assault on the senses. Markus Zusak’s prose sings, words rushing, falling, cascading over themselves to paint pictures as the narrator — Matthew, brother of Clay — engages the reader in conversation as he stream-of-consciousness thinks his way to understanding the life he and his four brothers have created.
The Dunbar boys — their mother dead, their father fled — live in Sydney’s Archer St. Zusak writes as poetically about the city streets and abandoned race track and grandstand as he does about the countryside refuge where Clay and his estranged father build their bridge in the shadow of a river that is at once beautiful and threatening.
Bridge of Clay is a written manifestation of the country in which it is set: Australia — hard, elemental, softened by touches of beauty and colour; the Dunbar brothers physical, no holds barred, softened by their love for each other and their animals, and the way they keep their mother’s love for the classics alive.
“Once in the tide of Dunbar past” is a favourite phrase of Matthew and it sums up the underpinning tenet and imagery of the novel — that life, like a river ebbs and flows, and, caught in the current, we sometimes swim, sometimes sink, but it will inevitably carry us to our destiny.
Looming over the Australian-ness of life in Archer St — its people, bookmaking, boyhood rivalry and competition, horse racing, pets and first loves — is the mystery of why the Dunbars’ father left. As always the answer is with Clay.
Clay is the centre of the story — punched out on an old typewriter by Matthew in flashback and the present — the fourth of the five boys, the one for whom everything must be painful as he strives to somehow create from that pain something meaningful.
The publisher’s copy of Bridge of Clay comes with a promo jacket emblazoned “The Most Anticipated Book of the Decade” — that’s some hype. Zusak has six other novels under his belt, including runaway success The Book Thief, also a film. He began Bridge of Clay before the fame that came his way with The Book Thief and it has been 13 years in the writing as he struggled with the concept that Clay is “building a bridge to transcend human-ness” and his desire to pour into this book everything as his coming-of-age novel.
To paraphrase Clay, it was never meant to be easy. Read slowly and savour, it lives up to the hype.