Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was

"Bridge of Birds is sort of 90º from the other things we’ve been discussing. It’s based on a Chinese folktale about a woman who is a minor god, and in order to ascend to heaven, every year, she can call on all the birds of China who will build a bridge to heaven out of their bodies, and she can climb it. The book is what happens when this goes bad, and someone steals the magical object that allows her to do that. It starts with frankly one of the most likeable narrators in all of fantasy, Number Ten Ox, who is big and who claims to be slow, but he is not. He’s a peasant, he has lived his whole life as a farmer, and he is not aware of a lot of political things or things going on in towns, so you get to experience this through his eyes – which is very clever, as it allows him to explain things without having to info-dump. His mentor and friend, Master Li, is extremely intelligent but has a “slight flaw in his character,” as he says. It’s a fantastical, ridiculous romp. It’s not that long, but they’re travelling across China, and it has a Raiders of the Lost Ark , big budget movie feel – you know, escaping traps and giant invisible spiders and the evil who is chasing them. It’s a fantastical, ridiculous romp. The author, I think, wound up getting a seven book deal or something, wrote two of them and then said; ‘No, I’m using this as a coping mechanism for my PTSD from Vietnam and I can’t do it anymore.’ Which was very sad. I love fairy tales! And not just because plots are hard to write, and when you’re retelling a fairy tale, it’s built in. I love how weird they get. And I love that, however weird they get, there’s still something that plucks a string in your psyche, and makes you say: yes, this is important. I love that. It’s almost like a built-in cheat code for the soul. And if you tell it well, you slide in under the reader’s defences, back to when they were reading their very first books on their own."