Bridge of Clay
In the beginning, there was one murderer, one mule and one boy…
from mz
I could throw myself into a dark yet bright-lit abyss that’s teeming with how I feel about Bridge of Clay. It took thirteen years to write, and there’s a narrative that those years were a kind of hell, or purgatory, after the unexpected success of The Book Thief.
All of it is true.
And none of it.
It was the hardest period of my writing life, and I did lose sight of my abilities. It was harrowing but also beautiful. I watched my children grow up in that time. I lived in a kind of Noah’s ark of a family, of two parents, two children, two dogs and two cats, and I was writing what I always knew would be the hardest book of my career.
Would I do things differently if I had that time again?
Again, absolutely – and absolutely not.
Bridge of Clay is, if nothing else, a big-hearted book that never cowers before the reader; it makes you work for it a little bit, which I think unsettled some people, and especially some who loved The Book Thief. Ultimately, that’s okay. It’s by no means the most difficult book in the world to read, and the rewards are absolutely in there. As I say sometimes, ‘It’s not a book for weaklings.’
It’s also better than The Book Thief in many ways…and I love Clay Dunbar. I love his brothers. I love their mum, Penelope, and their dad, Michael, and all their household animals. When you read it and hopefully have that breakthrough – when you feel like you’re in that small, teeming house on Archer Street – you become, in my mind, a Dunbar.
from the publisher
Let me tell you about our brother.
The fourth Dunbar boy named Clay.
Everything happened to him.
We were all of us changed through him.
The Dunbar boys bring each other up in a house run by their own rules. A family of ramshackle tragedy – their mother is dead, their father has fled – they love, fight, and learn to reckon with the adult world.
It is Clay, the quiet one, who will build a bridge with their father: for his family, for the past, for his sins. He builds a bridge to transcend humanness. To survive. A miracle and nothing less.
Markus Zusak makes his long-awaited return with a profoundly heartfelt and inventive novel about a family held together by stories, and a young life caught in the current: a boy in search of greatness as a cure for the painful past.
final note
In the end?
Books owe me nothing and I owe them everything. Bridge of Clay is a prime example, and I’m glad it took thirteen years. I’m glad I had to fight for it. I’m still here. It’s all the proof I need that I’m a writer, and I love words and their endless combinations.
I’ve also come across a considerable number of my readers who say that this is their book, that this is the one they carry with them. In so many ways, it typifies how I’ve always felt when a book comes out. We often want instant success, immediate gratification, but the more sensible part of me says, No, just give it five years. Better to write books that stand the test of time.
Lastly, I still think of Clay out there, somewhere. I wish I had his heart, his resolve. He might well be the quiet voice within that helps me persist when I doubt myself most. He reminds me it all means everything, and nothing. You write the book for them – the people inside the pages.