Bridge of Birds
EUR 3,43
Due adventures from the plague * - Fantasy with a touch of humour is uncommon. There are two excellent writers who have carved a significant niche in the fantasy field. Terry Pratchett is one, and Barry Hughart the other. Both have inventive minds, produce wonderfully exotic places and introduce us to characters no mainstream author would dare venture. Where Pratchett creates new places, Hughart devises a time that never was in a real place - China. This story of an imaginary China has every exemplary feature in fantasy - mystery, adventure, romance. It adds to these formulaic items a cast even Hollywood would be pressed to match. And, in twenty years since this book was published, has notably failed to do so. Perhaps it s just as well, because Hughart s excellence in story and character would be hard to portray in Hollywood terms.Hughart s tale of a quest to find a cure surpasses anything in the fantasy genre. A group of village children, limited in age range, has been struck down by a plague. How can a plague count? asks the local abbot. The children aren t dead, but in a coma. Perhaps a knowledgeable man would know of a cure. Lu Yu, Number Ten Ox, the strong tenth son of a peasant, is sent to find such a sage. He turns up Li Kao, a venerable sage with a slight flaw in his character. We think the slight flaw is his thirst for wine, but that proves too simple.Number Ten Ox carries Li Kao to various places in China seeking the Great Root of Power - a ginseng root endowed with great curative traits. Along the way, the duo encounter the Ancestress, an immense woman of immense powers of her own. They deal with the mind-reading Duke of Ch in, whose name was adopted by the West to describe all of China. Some lesser characters, Miser Chen, Henpecked Ho, and Doctor Death make their appearances, seemingly transitory. And Number Ten Ox falls in love. He adores the lady Lotus Cloud who has a bizarre preference for lovers that provide her with jade and pearls.Through all the adventures, no few of which are more than life-threatening, Number Ten Ox carries the image of the suffering children in his mind. It would be simple for him to turn away from the memory of their sleeping figures, but Ox is true to the quest. So long as he maintains his desire to cure them, Li Kao is retained to help. But it s far from clear which is driving which, since the Venerable Sage has developed his own quest - what is the meaning of a child s game verse? How does it affect all of China? Li Kao s drive for answers readily equals Ox s search for a cure for the plague.Hughart s stylistic quirks and sinuous plotting twists keeps this book a enchanting read. He places his protagonists in various quandaries, confronting them with dangers and delights. Li Kao s wine-sodden brain should leave him helpless, but he contrives to extricate the pair with penetrating analyses of each threat. At the end, when he must unravel the most fundamental mystery, what The Bridge of Birds is, he s more concerned with why he couldn t work out the solution sooner. But if he had, there wouldn t be a fine 278 page sequence to enjoy! [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]* with apologies and thanks to Janet Turner Hospital
Bridge of Bored - Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart is a modestly entertaining novel, by turns amusing and dull as a textbook. With the author s tendency to grossly underplay certain story elements, it is simultaneously simplistic and confounding. I suppose an optimist could look at these traits and say to himself, This is a book that works on manylevels. Being a pessimist, I m afraid I fall under the, This is a book that can t decide what it wants to be.Ostensibly this is a book about Lu Yu, nicknamed Number Ten Ox, who travels from his rural town to the big city to engage a wise man to return with him and cure the village s children of a deadly sleeping sickness (fortunately the sickness is not so deadly that the heros cannot fart around for a year or so before actually helping the sick children). The only wise man willing to work for the paltry sum offered by Number 10 Ox is Li Kao, a twinkly-eyed old drunk who has the perplexing ability to con anyone out of vast sums of money (putting into question his insistence on sleeping on the floor in a dirty old tenement in the first place). The cure takes the two on a romp through a mythical old China peopled with the kind of moronic rubes found in all fairy tales - those greedy and stupid enough to hand over their money just because someone tells them they ll be receiving some magic beans and a donkey that poops gold coins.Hughart stretches this hoary old chestnut within an inch of its elasticity as Master Li and Ox wander from city to city collecting bits of the Great Root of Power in order to effect the cure. But at times it appears that the only real purpose in doing all this traveling is to get Number 10 Ox laid, for he winds up in bed with a woman in every town. I expect this was meant to be amusing, but eventually became merely tedious.I am not generally prudish, but I found myself startled by the astounding amount of violence in this book. Couched in amusing anecdotes and twinkly narrative are hundreds upon hundreds of murders enacted by or caused by the two heros. I could see in many cases that the doomed characters deserved their fate, but not all. Bridge of Birds has its moments, but I didn t find it to be the gem of which so many reviewers wrote. Still, I liked it enough that if I come across the sequels, I will surely read them, but I won t be traipsing hundreds of leagues, murdering everyone who gets in my way, to find them. I may not even cross the street.
Brilliant fantasy - Bridge of Birds is the most effective, most moving fantasy novel I have read since John Crowley s Engine Summer. Set in (to use the publisher s blurb) an ancient China that never was, this is at least on the surface the tale of Number Ten Ox, a young man from a rural village who sets out with Master Li, a scholar and sage with a slight flaw in his character, on a quest for the great root of power, the only medicine of sufficient potency to cure the village children of a case of ku poisoning. As the story unfolds and these two characters experience adventures enough to fill many novels (one can imagine Tor or some other publisher spinning out these yarns by the tens a la Conan if they got a hold of the publishing rights), their quest begins to intertwine with another one, relating to an ancient wrong done to a goddess.More details would be superfluous, for there is simply no substitute for reading this book. The culture and characters described here are fully realized (writers of doorstop-sized fantasy novels, such as Robert Jordan, could take object lessons from Hughart in how to tell a large story succinctly), and the overall atmosphere that this novel achieves is that of the finest kind of fable, although I would not necessarily recommend it for young children. Hughart spices his narrative throughout with a liberal dose of humor, I found myself laughing aloud many times as I read along. If there is a flaw to be found here, I failed to see it. This is as good as fantasy gets--one of the few novels that merits the adjective magical.
Wonderfully funny but also moving. - I ve never picked up a book and fallen in love with it so quickly before. The characters are uniquely memorable and the first thing you do when you finish it will be to read it again. Only then will you frienziedly try to find any other story in the same series.
Remember beauty is highly overated - This a great book to read if you are tired of serious stories with dark themes and depressing endings. Bridge of Birds leaves you with the feeling that matter how bad things are there is always hope and that eventually good will triumph over evil. The brillance of this book is that it manages to onvey this message in a humorous mystery/adventure. It does not come off as being the least bit preachy. I was impressed that the value of the female characters did not depend upon how young and attractive they were. The woman that all the men love is a common girl with a great passion for life. My one criticism of the book is that its humor depends upon poking fun at Chinese culture.