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Lauren Beukes
(Michael Joseph, August 2023)
Review by Nick Hubble
BRIDGE IS THE LATEST novel from the now London-based Lauren Beukes. The UK edition was published the day after she announced Ned Beauman as the latest winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award at the ceremony in St Martins Hall, Trafalgar Square, on Wednesday 16 August. The novel begins in Portland with titular character Bridge (short for Bridget) struggling in the aftermath of the death of her scientist mother, Jo, as she tries to deal with the accumulated ‘sadmin’. It quickly transpires that the trips to parallel universes she remembers taking as a child with her mother were not in fact a fantasy of Jo’s, as Bridge has been told by a succession of therapists, but were enabled by an otherworldly ‘dreamworm’ that she has now inherited. To the horror of her nonbinary friend Dom, who threatens throughout to steal the novel, Bridge becomes obsessed with jumping between her ‘otherselves’ in multiple realities and thereby finding one in which her mom is still alive. However, it quickly becomes apparent that other people are also interested in getting hold of the dreamworm at any costs. Furthermore, if it comes to that, is Bridge herself ethically justified in her actions? She jumps in and out of her other lives with little regard for how it feels for them.
While her motivations might not be beyond reproach, Bridge shares the off-beat charm of Kirby, the protagonist of Beukes’s 2013 bestseller, The Shining Girls, which was recently adapted into an Apple TV show. Despite having significantly less violence than the earlier novel, Bridge is nonetheless harder edged because Beukes is now more prepared to make us feel uncomfortable in ways that are not just a product of plot tension. The manner in which the novel dissects our contemporary moment, layering its historicity through the flashbacks to Jo’s experiences, and incorporates it into the plot of a thriller is something of a tour-de-force. In particular, there’s an amazing sequence about halfway through the novel in which Bridge jumps through a multitude of universes in quick succession to see if Jo is alive in any of them, but instead finds multiple versions of herself caught up within the basic activities of everyday life:
Working and studying and masturbating and sleeping and eating and fucking and watching TV (a lot) and being on the toilet and in the shower, at the gym and reading a book and walking in the park and sitting in traffic and feeding a cat (but you are not sure if it is your cat), and swimming in a lake and holding a handful of pills in another bathroom, pills you flush away and hope to fuck they weren’t methadone.
The banal, ordinary nature of these experiences, and the preponderance of bathrooms in particular, causes Bridge to progress from wondering in general ‘is this really how we spend our lives?’ to contemplating her failure across universes to achieve more, and asking herself ‘is this all you are capable of?’ It’s a clever way of showing how women’s experiences in general impact upon how particular individuals perceive themselves. Jo’s earlier experiences in the parallel universes, revealed to us through her diary entries, provide an interesting contrast. As she comes to admit to herself, her successes—managing to leave her husband, completing her PhD at the age of 39 and making her career in neuroscience—were due to her knowing they were possible because she had seen other Jos achieve these. Therefore, it is not just the mother-daughter relationship but the generational divide between Jo and Bridge which is central to the novel. This is dramatised through their different attitudes to issues such as the level of opportunity for consent that they should afford to their ‘otherselves’ before taking over their lives.
It’s tempting to see Jo, and her counterparts Joanne and Jo-Anne, as a deliberate nod to the ongoing influence of the four Joannas in Joanna Russ’s 1975 feminist classic, The Female Man. However, Bridge most definitely represents the values of a different generation in the same way that Beukes is very much a twenty-first-century writer. These themes continue to underpin the second half of the novel as the tension of the situation rises, culminating in an 80-page blow-by-blow narration of a two-hour sequence in which the action cuts seamlessly across more than one universe. While there is some taking stock in the concluding chapters, not all the ends are tidied up and there is a slightly provocative, piquant epilogue which I particularly enjoyed.
In a recent interview with Nerd Daily, Beukes discussed her inspiration for Bridge as coming in part from the realisation that we are currently living in the face of cultural divides that are continuously getting wider: ‘The truth (in a post-truth era) is that we already live in alternate realities from each other’. It seems to me that rather than continue to worry impotently, as the mainstream media do, about such a divided culture arising, we should take a leaf out of Beukes’ book and accept irrevocable schism as the new reality. What we need are stories, such as Bridge, which address this situation squarely and provide us with the working models for new emotional attitudes that might help us to live through these times.