Faerie Bridges--a reprise

I wrote this brief essay on bridges in Susanna Clarke's faerie for Apex Magazine back in September 2010. How long, long, LONG ago that seems now.

Anyway, there's been some interesting conversations among my DW friends about Clarke's short-story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu, and on sovay's suggestion, I thought I'd repost it here:

In “Tom Brightwind, or How the Fairy Bridge Was Built at Thoresby,” a short story of Susanna Clark’s in the collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu, the fairy Tom Brightwind is persuaded to build a bridge connecting the depressed little town of Thoresby to the outside world.

He promises to do it in just one night. Not hard, you say, because he is a fairy. True, but what was interesting to me was how he did it. He didn’t magic up a bridge out of clouds and air. He didn’t even magic up masonry and float it into place. No: instead, he uses his magic to summon horses and workmen from their sleep, along with an architectural student (who comes equipped with a book that has an image of a bridge by Piranesi, which is to be their model), a stonemason, and an engineer.

The engineer must direct the workmen to build the bridge. It doesn’t go smoothly:

By two o’clock Henry Cornelius [the architectural student] was in despair. The river was not deep enough to accommodate Piranesi’s bridge. He could not build as high as he wished. But Mr. Alfreton, the master mason, was unconcerned. “Do not vex yourself, sir,” he said. “Mr Wakely [the engineer] is going to make some adjustments.

But eventually the bridge is built, and the enchanted laborers all find themselves drifting back to sleep (the story doesn’t tell us how or when they make it back to their homes again).

I was intrigued by this method of building the bridge, especially given the fantastical fairy bridges in Faerie itself, as conceived by Susanna Clark in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. In this excerpt, the (human) magician Jonathan Strange describes one such bridge:

Then suddenly I passed under an arch and found myself upon a stone bridge that crossed a dark, empty landscape. The bridge was so vast that I could not see the end of it … It was much higher than any bridge I have ever seen in this world. The ground appeared to be several thousand feet beneath me.”

That bridge, I fancy, was not build by architects, stonemasons, and laborers roused from their sleep. One can’t imagine them knowing how and where to begin to build such a thing. That bridge, moreover, lies along the “King’s Roads” in Faerie:

The King’s Roads lead everywhere … They were built by magic. Every mirror, every puddle, every shadow in England is a gate to those roads.”

So a fairy bridge, built in Faerie, is built by magic, and is beyond real in all dimensions and attributes. But a fairy bridge, built in this world, even by magic, must adhere to the laws of physics, must take into account statics and stresses and load-bearing members … and river depths. So maybe that’s why, even when built by magic, a bridge in this world requires an engineer, a stonemason, and many workmen.

Then again, maybe it was all down to the whim of Tom Brightwind. What do you think?

Image is "A View of Part of the Intended Bridge at Blackfriars, London," and I use it for illustration purposes ... can you guess why? I will tell: it's because it's by Giovanni Battista PIRANESI