Excessive Candour
Spanner in the Works

Something happened here, and I don't really know what it was, but I'm going to make a guess. I think maybe the difficulty Gregory Frost seems to have had getting Shadowbridge underway—a difficulty never really resolved—derives half from love and half from drowning. I think maybe Gregory Frost fell too much in love with the world of Shadowbridge he had invented, an endlessly fragrant illimitable expanse of ocean spanned by innumerable inhabited bridges, each bridge connecting to another and each culture differing from the previous, like a vast gameboard some god (or forerunner species) must have laid down to play with, Jack Chalker without fat naked women on forced diets, Jack Vance without the Reach; and that he found out that his world was too good to tell. It is certainly the case that all the tricks of the writer's workshop seem to have been applied here to give an appearance of motion to a story without a tale to bite. Shadowbridge as published is a series of lessons in how to avoid getting to the other side of beginning.

There is of course some typical publishing nonsense afoot here. The Del Rey desk of the Ballantine Books province of the Random House Publishing Group empire of the Random House satrapy of Bertelsmann has sagaciously divided what was almost certainly a single full-length manuscript into two pretty modest separate volumes—a blurb at the rear of the book duly advises us to bate our breaths against the future release of the second instalment, which is to be called Lord Tophet—but I don't think the buck really stops with the publisher this time round. Of course it is barbarous to publish second halves of single novels as though they were sequels, and certainly that is what Del Rey ad infinitum did here, just like Tor's projectile publication of Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight in two initial volumes; but Frost's big novel was not cut off at the waist in full spate. Shadowbridge never began.

There is, all the same, no incompetence here. Frost gives every sign at first of knowing that it should be his task to conduct his readers along the bridge of story till it ends. And the exemplary first 25-page section of Shadowbridge does, in fact, give off a considerable charge of telling, though even here something odd seems to be going on (or not going on), a sense somehow that readers are encountering for the first time material that the author is all too consciously revisiting. I do know of at least one earlier episode set in this universe, "How Meersh the Bedeviller Lost His Toes," a comparatively sprightly tale from 1998; and there may be others. But that story was (perhaps ominously) written at least a decade ago, and relatively few of those who now pick up Shadowbridge could be expected to make the connection; any sense that Shadowbridge is Twice-Told needs to be earned. Weariness must be earned. ...

Whatever. We are on a bustling mercantile bridge called Vijnagar (which I'm afraid I subvocalized as Malt). Young but seemingly adult Leodora—a traveling shadow puppeeter who has just arrived on Vijnagar with her mentor to give some performances—clambers up one of the sustaining towers, past icons and stone statues of various gods, to get a view of the whole span, and beyond that, in every direction, the great encircling ocean. (Intriguingly, though this is clearly the first time Leodora has climbed high enough above her world to gain such a perspective, she does not perceive the horizon as being curved: As this is almost the first thing she would notice if we were meant to understand that Shadowbridge was a planet, it may be safe to assume that the setting is not a planet but a world: a fantasy oceanscape without bourne, or a godgame board whose god will manifest anon, or the inside of an SF worldship so huge there is no telling.) Leodora's performances with shadow puppets—Frost describes them in terms of the traditional Chinese shadow theater—have already attracted notice for her great and haunting skill in the transfiguration of local lore and rumor into shadow stories that seem to bind the shadow world together; and it seems entirely fitting that Shadowbridge begins with its protagonist gaining a commanding perspective of the godgame Gaia she is fated to shape.

A dragon baited and switched

Time for a god to appear, one guesses. No problem. Leodora is immediately accosted by the suddenly animate stone image of a god named Shumyzin, who asks her to tell him his own story, "The Tale of Shumyzin," which she does, for she is a god teller and a world teller (they are both the same story in the end); she makes everything she touches storyable (the bones of the world live by being told). Deeply moved by her hallowing of his story, Shumyzin tells her that he knows about the dreams that haunt her, that she "rattles the darkness" and that he has one further secret to impart, but turns back to stone before conveying that final secret. Leodora climbs back down to the streets of Malt, and during her acclaimed performance that night tells her second story of the day, "The Tale of Creation," about Chilingana the creator of the world and the storyfish his wife accidentally beheads and cooks before it can convey its final secret, and about Chilingana's unending quest to gain sight again of the storyfish whole and prelapsarian, as it was in the beginning, and to hear from the mouth of the storyfish the final secret of the world, whose spans unfold before him every morning as he passes onward and onward searching for the bone story. For storyable is the bone of the world.

After the performance of this tale, which intensifies the sense that we have properly begun a novel, Leodora opens her traveling box, which conceals the secret icon she calls the Coral Man, and which (or Whom) she now caresses. Shadowbridge deepens suddenly: Leodora is herself shadowed by, or the shadow of, something akin to a god, which seems ready to convey to her, and to us, something of the grammar of things. We are ready to begin. Leodora tastes her fingers. They taste of sea salt.

Within that flavor lay her whole life before the spans: the cavern called Fishkill, the lagoon where she swam, the tales of her mother, the smell of the breeze entering her tiny garret.

Memories of the backwater island life she had abandoned.

And with that sentence fragment the first part of Shadowbridge closes, chllingly, because without turning the page we know what Frost is going to do now. Because any professional writer who climaxes a chapter with a sentence fragment including the word "memories" is a professional writer getting ready to patch in a flashback from his hard disk. In the retail trade, it is known as Bait and Switch.

There is not much more that one can say. The second section of Shadowbridge is a thoroughly routine Young Adult novella, a hugely distended tale within the network of tales that makes up the book, 90 pages long, as benumbing for an adult to read as almost any story written for the Young Adult market, whose products are about as close to genuine fiction as megachurches are to monasteries where silence is observed. Frost's exemplum is typically all about dysfunctional family members and loneliness and teenage love and naivete and learning and coping and the hardscrabble island existence that chafes the spirit of the budding protagonist and the alcove she thinks (wrongly!) is hidden from all but her so she can swim there entirely unclothed but chaste except her teenage admirer sees her or maybe somebody else does. But there is one scene that may turn out to be a classic: The pubescent Leodora is mysteriously approached in her lagoon by a young aquatic dragon who seems to revere her, and rides this dragon stark naked up and down the coast in full view of several shocked villages, committing several dragon-related blasphemies and making impossible her forced marriage to a brutal neighbor's brutal son. Inter alia her guilt-ridden (don't ask) drunken mentor has been teaching her about her true father—he's the great shadow puppeter Bardsham, a specialist in the story of Meersh (see above), and he may be dead—and after the come of the dragon they both figure it's time to escape the island and her childhood, and they climb a nearby tower into a conveniently populous span and she begins the career we have already seen her a master of. And we bid farewell to Young Adult World, which told us little we needed to know about Leodora, and nothing about Shadowbridge.

A bridge too far

But there's more. Frost's reluctance to get on with (and therefore be forced to end) the story of Shadowbridge is, as I've suggested, pretty profound. Shadow puppet performances are accompanied by music, but Leodora's musician sucks. The third section of the book is entitled Diverus, and it is the story (as Leodora tells it) of the childhood of the mentally defective lad who—after god-lightning strikes him—becomes her new partner and Shadowbridge's greatest musician, as great in his sphere as Leodora is in hers. Another 60 pages have been spent. We are not very far from the end of the volume. Because Leodora's mentor is very afraid of something that has not been described to us (nor will it be in Shadowbridge, though a hint is dropped that what frightens him may be the entity who gives his or its name to the next volume), Leodora and Diverus are forced to travel from span to span, escaping something or other, but learning little.

Finally, on the second-to-last page of the book, Leodora is struck by god-lightning (like Diverus before her) and falls "into oblivion." So, after more than 200 pages of digression, we return to the actual story, to the process of transfigurative learning and becoming that had begun with Shumyzin and with Leodora's epiphanic realization of the Coral Man's chthonic sea-salt taste (see above) that reeks of god. But we turn the page and the book is over. Given the narrative skills he so amply deploys, and given the clear highly knowledgable clues he drops as to the kind of tale he has to tell, it is not easy to exculpate Frost from the charge that he meant to make his beloved hard-to-leave Shadowbridge into exactly what it became: a story that does not turn: a bridge that does not span.

But even love drowns if it is not told.