THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by THORNTON WILDER

To what extent is life governed by external forces? Everyone who has caught the eye of a stranger in a crowd must surely wonder what their life story is, how they came to be standing opposite you at this precise moment, and whether you have anything in common with them. Then you pass on your way, and forget their face, for meetings of this nature are fleeting and private, and not really meetings at all. When the Inca rope bridge collapses, killing those standing upon it, Brother Juniper observes and collects the life histories of the dead, trying to find a pattern and to make sense of the apparent chaos.

            The dead are tangentially connected, primarily through questions of familial loyalty, love, and geography. The Marquesa de Montemayor, a great writer of letters, whose ugliness led to isolation in high society, dies with nothing but love for her indifferent daughter. Her companion, a young girl raised in a convent, feels lonely but cannot express her misery through letters, and the two realise that they share a life of cowardice. The twins, Esteban and Manuel, were raised in the same convent as the companion of the Marquesa, and have the closeness that only twins can obtain. Love for a actress drives them apart, and the blood tie is strained to breaking point. The casual nature of disease kills one, and the bridge the other. The actress’ valet is also on the bridge, pained from the realisation that his protégé has become the mask that she donned to fit into the high society shunned by the Marquesa for being superficial.

            The empty vanity of the actress, the Gatsby-esque dream of raising oneself, forces her away from those she loved. Yet the ephemeral nature of her beauty is shadowed by the fate of the ugly Marquesa; society has many barriers outside birth and status, and those rules shape the lives of the people who fleetingly touch that world whether they understand them or not. The twins and the Marquesa’s companion are drawn from the opposite end of society yet they cannot escape the slow destruction of mutual relationships any more than those with money and power.

            Brother Juniper’s collection of work on the destruction of the bridge is considered heretical, and he dies in the name of knowledge and truth. Those on the bridge die as their love dies, as their families fall apart, as consistency and justice and loyalty collapse just as the ropes under their feet collapse. There is no peace for those who crossed the Bridge of San Luis Rey, it is not a punishment from God nor a release from their shattered lives. The book is neither sorrowful nor joyful in its conclusion, but it is as delicately written as the lives of those within it. 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, paperback Penguin Modern Classics, 124pp