Every great book has as a theme the need for connection: the human desire to connect with another living being. In The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, a priest tries to find the connection between the five people killed by the unexpected collapse of the Bridge of San Luis Rey and his faith in God. For his efforts to see a link between the character of a person and the sudden, premature death brought on by calamity, he is burned at the stake for heresy. He should have left faith out of the equation completely: as the old Abbess of the orphanage/hospital understands, the love between humans is the only connection that matters:
“[s]oon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
This novel was nothing like the Wilder I know from having seen and read Our Town. This Wilder is imaginative but completely genuine with his characters, each more exquisite and bizarre than the next, and each portrayed down to the smallest detail of countenance, spirit, and philosophy. There are no stereotypes, and even minor characters are richly portrayed in a multitude of dimensions. All the characters, main and peripheral, are so perfectly rendered that I felt as if I myself had seen them on the streets of Lima. I experienced first-hand the changes the main characters undergo over the course of their individual stories, and I mourned their demise as they crossed the bridge in what was supposed to be a cross over to a new way of life but instead was the step that ended their lives in one whip crack of collapse.
Those characters that survive and feel such sorrows for having been left behind are equally compelling; again, I felt as if I myself experienced their moments of profound transformation, almost like a transubstantiation, into another element: the element of understanding. They are the lucky ones not because they are alive, but because they understand the love that existed for them, and will always exist even though the beloved are gone.
The book does not proceed in a straight line but rather in circles around the main point of reference, the collapse of the bridge. There are sequences of a character’s internal dialogues that lose all sense of time, becoming labyrinthine in dead ends of musings and resolutions and memories. Eventually we see the links that serve to connect one character to another. In the end, they are all linked, and time can proceed forward, to their joint funeral and the grieving of those left behind.
As wonderfully as Wilder evokes the Midwest in Our Town, he brings the Lima of the 18th century fully alive in The Bridge of San Luis Rey; a satellite of Spain, Lima was vibrant with Spanish theater and literature, vying for both opulence and atmosphere equal to its mother country, and specifically, Madrid. Even the outlying towns became re-creations of European spas and pilgrimages remembered with longing by the ex-pat Spaniards. Woven in with the Spanish culture are references to the Inca past and the times of pre-history under the shadow of the Andes. The background is perfect for the recounting these almost mystical lives of seemingly ordinary people. Their story becomes the stuff of myths. In giving us the myth of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder tell us the most profound truth: there is no individual meaning in life, there is only the meaning found in our connections with others.
