Review of Bridge by Lauren Beukes

W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage is cited as a classic coming-of-age novel. About a boy named Philip born with a club foot whose parents die within months of one another, the novel describes his growing up, chasing dreams, and coming to terms with his reality—not growing up, rather “growing up”. Philip's early 20th century London is different than London today, however. Technology has made a difference. There was no Facebook or Instagram to play with his teenage self-conception. There were minimal medical treatments available to help with his condition—to bring his club foot closer to “normal”. Writing a coming-of-age novel in 2023 is something entirely different. Capturing our information-saturated world in literal and figurative means with a genre twist is Lauren Beukes' Bridge (2023).

Her parents having divorced at an early age, Bridget has spent most of her life in the custody of her mother, a woman named Jo who focuses on her career more than her daughter. Bridget is an independent teen for it, and in keeping with the stereotypes of millennials, feels she understands the world backwards and forwards despite the massive struggles of her teen years. But then Jo contracts brain cancer, and dies. Pretending not to care, Bridget starts going through her mother's belongings, including the refrigerator, in which she finds something that will take her life in a new direction. In the mother of all centrifuges, Bridget's life spins into the absurd.

Mainstream genre would be wont to categorize the novel as 'alternate universe fiction'. That would be a disservice. Bridge is not one of those novels. Alternate universe is a device, yes, but the novel feels more Jungian, more shattered mirror, more voodoo, more, dare I say it, more metaphorical than hard science fiction would have it. I must pause here in order not to spoil too much, but I think it's fair to say Beukes successfully invokes a sense of fragmented reality, a reality a teenage girl might feel...

Which is the perfect time to praise Bridge for the manner in which it captures the kaleidoscope / ricochet robots / kangaroo court / echo chamber known as the modern information sphere. If it all gets to be too much—too many angles, too many images, too many opinions, too much information—then Beukes does a good job capturing that feeling—not in exposition, rather in story. (Beukes is a good stylist with a decent knack for flair; I'm not critiquing her diction.) It's the story, specifically its structure and flow, which capture the merry-go-round of sense of modern existence we sometimes feel. And it's here that Beukes displays the skills she has been experimenting with and honing for more than a decade.

A comment on the title. The reader may want to see Bridge as a metaphor. Don't bother. Significantly more likely is that Beukes, having spent so much time in the mind of her main character, applying her own bit of motherly empathy for Bridget's difficult but relatable situation, naming the novel after her. Reading the novel it makes sense, and when taken as a nickname, becomes unique.

I have one major criticism: at the structural level the novel doesn't know what it wants to be. Bridge takes its time getting off the ground, and that take off is wobbly, spiraling, upside down, and inside out. The first one third to half of the novel, as Bridget's life spins out of control, is uncertainty defined. The reader keeps putting their foot out, hoping for something firm beneath, but finds only liquids of varying solidity. I would describe this representation of Bridge's reality as a poetic, or perhaps just metaphorical. Regardless, at about the halfway mark the liquids start to gel, and the reader gains confidence in the poetry/metaphor. But as the novel picks up speed, an old trick, a trick Beukes used in The Shining Girls, emerges. The ol' serial killer shtick. And as the novels wings towards its conclusion, it becomes full out genre. This transition, from something leaning toward literary fiction into something genre in nature, undermines the integrity of Bridge's journey. The serial killer was entirely unnecessary from a thematic standpoint. Beukes could have more effectively portrayed Bridge's coming of age by bringing the poetry/metaphor to an organic conclusion. The change of gears, grinds.

To drive this point home further, it's worth looking at character. Bridge, her mother, and her father occupy both the pro- and antagonist roles in the first half of the novel. You see their innocence and guilt, their harried normalcy, their relatable flaws, their humanity. But at one point a villain emerges, the “real” antagonist. And its an overt villain, a villain the reader struggles to relate to at the same 2D level. The milieu of Bridge's existence does more than enough to present an obstacle, a challenge for Bridge. It wasn't necessary to objectify her troubles in a simple, borderline cartoonish character. The villain lacks the depth of Bridge and her family. But wait, you say, do play along with Beukes' Faustian parallel. I did. I recognize it. But I still feel the ethereal devil was fully realized, it's physical personification unnecessary.

In the end, Bridge is a slow burn that pays off in a highly personal yet wildly imaginative story of one young woman's coming of age. I would be remiss not to point out that the Jo, Bridge's mother forms a pillar of the novel also, and that Beukes was obviously aiming the book toward mothers and daughters. I would assume Beukes didn't not explicitly set out to write a novel for mothers and daughters at odds with one another; Bridge's “adventures” are too obtuse to be precisely that. And yet there is a mother-daughter dynamic to the novel that throws its jabs and hooks in the form of voodoo dreams, alternate views to reality, and the mirror ball that is (d)information. This is a novel for our times, and in the sad lot which is the books I read published in 2023, this one pokes its nose above most, but just its nose.