About book The Canal Bridge: A Novel Of Ireland, Love, And The First World War (2014)
Feel free to write off this review as the bias of a cranky, old man with ancestral roots in the northern part of the divided island, but The Canal Bridge: A Novel of Ireland, Love, and the First World War seemed like a brilliantly poetic idealization of carnage, criminal fanaticism, and suffering. The carnage was not exclusive to the War to End All Wars, the criminal fanaticism was the selfish twisting of the Fenian cause to serve one’s personal ambition, and the suffering was physical, emotional, and spiritual—wounds, death, grief, and loneliness.In spite of the fact that my overall impression of this book was that it was the author’s indulgence of his poetic insights to the detriment of story and the fact that anyone who has read my previous (“self-indulgent”) reviews on this site will know that I hate schizophrenic books where point-of-view shifts as a conceit rather than advancing the story, there are some occasional insights. I liked the priest’s observation, “There’s times when I think the Irish begrudge and belittle each other more than the English humiliate us. If they can’t do something themselves, they’ll keep everyone else from doing it with their belittling.” (p. 84) In fact, even though I question the value of poetically indulging oneself with the horrors of war, there were times when I couldn’t help but appreciate passages like: “[The artillery barrage] was like living in an enormous building the shape of the Canal Bridge, except the arch was made of noise instead of stone—screeching, howling, roaring, piercing, bone-shaking, head-splitting, explosive, brain-numbing, nonstop, nonstop, nonstop, nonstop.” (p. 97) I even felt a sick convulsion in my stomach when the dead from the Battle of the Somme were compared with sheaves after the harvest (p. 136). The Canal Bridge is based, as billed on the cover, as a love story. It really isn’t a simple love story. It really deals with multiple love stories which overlap with multiple love triangles. The so-called Hatchel Triplets, a sister, brother, and adopted orphan form one. Matthew Wrenn is in love with Kitty, but opens himself up more with her brother. Con, is in love with the wealthy landowner’s daughter, but Kitty believes the daughter is going to take Matthew away from her. These delicate relationships are set against the backdrop of the horrors and losses of war, as well as the abuses in the name of Irish Republicanism (I am being honest about the abuses, but not unsympathetic to the cause itself.). Of course, I’ve noticed a pattern present in the current crop of novels about World War I. The so-called Great War caused a lot of people to deny God because of the counter-evidence to God’s goodness. Instead of presenting the axiom about no atheists existing in foxholes, this book and others suggest the opposite. I find the arrogance of this position to be offensive. I realize that suffering, particularly meaningless suffering, would bring about a crisis of faith and denial by some, but the “matter of fact” and coldly rational assumption in this book doesn’t take complexity and human accountability into account. Assuming that God values the human will, one simply cannot know when and how God might apply the “Prime Directive” of non-interference. Theists recognize that God does involve the Divine Self on occasion, but there is biblical evidence to suggest that one desires the help before the intervention, as well as the fact that such intervention is not “guaranteed.” It appears to be the fact that one cannot manipulate God into acting as one desires into being a cosmic bellhop or fairy tale godmother that causes this denial of God’s existence. This is a more complex argument than I can offer space at this time, but it deserves more consideration than the deterministic, binary view of God presented in the minds of the characters in this book (and even in many of Anne Perry’s characters in her WWI series).The above considerations made me uncomfortable with the recurring description of the placid water underneath The Canal Bridge of the title as “sanctifying grace, as smooth as mercury in a glass and as warm as custard on apple cake in winter.” (p. 219) When one uses the existence of evil (rather a necessity for authentic choice, one would think) as an excuse to exorcise the Divine from all existence, what concept of “grace” does one really have? Are the characters merely blowing upon the coals of the heart here (apologies to Archibald MacLeish) are have they really found some kind of salvation in this tiny spot of nature?Not being willing to close on a negative note, let me state that I liked the clever sobriquet given to one of the main characters as “The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Stretcher Bearers,” an intriguing reference citing a soldier in the Boer War who allegedly had as many escapes as the swashbuckling hero of the post-French Revolutionary hero (p. 156). I haven’t figured out if this is the author’s fiction or a real-life reference, but I’m checking. The Canal Bridge has some historical value, some clever passages, and a solid insight into the Celtic underpinnings of Irish culture. Yet, for me, it was schizophrenic and lacking.
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