Brother Juniper’s Inquisition

Sometimes, confessing to a favourite book can bring a flush of embarrassment to the cheeks. We tend to make such selections at a susceptible age and they don’t necessarily stand up to the test of time. ‘Isn’t that a bit . . . well . . . teenaged?’ some inquirer will ask with a shrivelling look.

I am only too aware of this snooty equivalent of the lifted lorgnette as I admit to a long-standing love of Thornton Wilder’s little slip of a book: The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Wilder, born in small-town America at the turn of the last century, remained popular until the Sixties. But then he fell out of fashion, and the 1927 novel which made his name as a writer and won him the first of three Pulitzer prizes is all too often dismissed as a piece of mannered sentimentality. Even the author’s biographer, Gilbert A. Harrison, who lingers for page after page on the complex and prodigiously erudite character of his subject – a prolific author who served in both world wars, smoked and drank far too much, talked inexhaustibly, mixed in glittering circles and nurtured an almost illimitable range of enthusiasms – skims over this early publication. For any lingering fans, its fate was pretty much sealed when Tony Blair chose to quote from it in a service to commemorate the lives that were lost in the World Trade Center attack. I looked it out, yet again, at that time. As I opened my little Penguin paperback, a last tatty legacy of a gap year spent in Peru, I determined to feel sceptical. Surely I would have outgrown it? Surely I wasn’t going to fall prey to this purveyor of quotes to a grandstanding politician? It’s obvious why Mr Blair alighted on this book. Taking a real historical event as its starting-point, the story opens at a moment of unforeseen disaster. It is noon on Friday, 20 July 1714, and a bridge – a ladder of thin slats slung over a gorge in the Peruvian Andes – suddenly breaks, flinging to their deaths the five travellers who happen to be crossing it at the time. Wilder presents us with a moment of stunned disbelief. This bridge, he explains, known and admired and used for more than a century, ‘seemed to be among the things that would last for ever’. No one, not even the Archbishop of Lima, would have descended with the coaches and baggage to pass over the river by raft rather than cross the famous bridge of San Luis Rey. ‘It was unthinkable that it would break.’ There is a great searching of hearts in the beautiful city of Lima. But for all that the people are profoundly moved, only one person does anything about it. A Franciscan missionary, Brother Juniper, happened to witness the accident: ‘He saw the bridge divide and fling five gesticulating ants into the valley below.’

‘Within ten minutes myself !’ anyone else would have thought with secret joy: but not this monk. ‘Why did this happen to those five?’ he wonders. ‘If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there was any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.’

Brother Juniper resolves to pursue an inquisition into the lives of those who have perished and so to discover whether what seemed a random misfortune was in fact a part of the pattern of an all-encompassing vision. He sets out with determined objectivity to find out nothing less than the meaning of life – and death. It is from this point that the novel unfolds: a series of stories within a story exploring the connections between such accidentally contingent characters as the lonely old Marquesa who, when not inebriated, spends her time composing brilliant and elaborate letters to a daughter who cares nothing for her; Esteban, the orphan cut adrift in an uncomprehending world by the loss of his twin (Wilder himself had an identical twin who died at birth); little Jaime, the beautiful but sickly son of a great actress who has been reared in seclusion. Wilder works like a mosaicist, picking up each word and placing it with self-conscious craftsmanship. Fragment by fragment, he forms a picture from these tiny polished pieces. Its reflective aphorisms (‘Even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other’); its eye-catching insights (‘Like all solitary persons he had invested friendship with a divine glamour’); its evocative descriptions (a llama is ‘a lady with a long neck and sweet, shallow eyes, burdened down by a fur cape too heavy for her, and picking her way delicately down an interminable staircase’) can all be picked out and examined like precious objects. Wilder uses a miniaturist’s exquisite precision to seduce. But in the long run it’s the wider perspective that counts. ‘I am not interested’, Wilder once told an interviewer, ‘in the ephemeral; in such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat in the lives of millions.’ Wilder’s characters are easily criticized for seeming like ciphers. This is true. But it is not the point. This author is not peddling the superficial details of personality; he is exploring the profounder mysteries of the human heart. As the patterns of his ideas start to form, the reader feels their pull as a traveller across a footbridge can feel the giddy plunge of the drop. Wilder is not describing the individual, he is seeking out the universal. He is speaking of the loneliness that haunts our existence. This is the discomfiting emptiness that he forces us to cross. He stares into it, unblinking. That is precisely why he is not a sentimentalist. A sentimentalist is a type who, as Wilder once described it, would, in the hope of being happy, suppress knowledge in favour of the more comfortable lie. This is not the path that Wilder himself takes. He looks at the pains and elations, the complexities and incongruities of life. But rather than simply portraying them, he confronts them on the higher level of reflection. The novel draws to an ambivalent close. Far from solving the mystery, Brother Juniper’s efforts serve to deepen it. A harsh twist of irony adds a final fierce sadness. Few – least of all Mr Blair with his voice-coached catch-in-the-throat – can reach the end of this novel without the tears welling. ‘There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning,’ Wilder concludes. So: all you need is love. It’s not a pop-song platitude for susceptible teenagers. It’s a piece of earned wisdom.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 19 © Rachel Campbell-Johnston 2008