parlando

watsoning

Posted on February 6th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Books.

I know a few people here have read Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds, with varying reactions (hi Gavin, Ellie, Debbie). It won a World Fantasy Award when it was originally published (in the late 70s, I think), so it's not exactly obscure; but Hughart's career never progressed beyond that success, and these days I rarely hear it mentioned. It is in print (in mass market paperback).

So many modern fantasies are bloated epics. Bridge of Birds is the opposite: a compact, self-contained, perfect little gem, like Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint, Pamela Dean's The Dubious Hills, Thorne Smith's Night Life of the Gods. (Sorry, lists always start to get out of hand with me.)

Bridge of Birds has a farcical comic tone and plot, but begins with tragedy and ends with sublime transendence, and somehow makes the whole mix work. When I was reading it to Velma a few years ago, she discovered that Hughart allowed the first draft to be published on the web. I don't recommend it unless you've read the book; for one thing, the farcical tone of the book is not under control in this early draft. It's far cruder and louder and not really funny. But if you've read the book, it's fascinating to see that it grew from this. There are plot elements that never made it into Bridge of Birds that turn up in the two (sadly inferior*) sequels.

More importantly, Hughart clearly made a huge jump in his writing between this draft and the final version, and the heart of the book was completely reconstructed. In the first draft, the narrator and hero is the brilliant Li Kao, who is 19 years old, while Number Ten Ox is an incidental character, the village idiot. In the final version, Li Kao is still brilliant, still the focus of the book, but he is ancient; Number Ten Ox is the narrator, a humble young man of virtue and strength and unextraordinary brain, and the perfect Watson for Li Kao. This change, I think, allowed the book to happen as it did: a character like Li Kao needs to be presented from outside, like Jeeves.

* The first time I wrote about this, I got a comment from someone who read one of the sequels first, and prefers it to the first book. So maybe it's just the order one reads them in. It's hard for me to credit, though.

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