The iron bridge: a book review
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‘THE IRON BRIDGE: A BOOK REVIEW’ Abington Friends School Jenkintown, PA NEH Summer Seminar 2000 Historical Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in Britain University of Massachusetts Dartmouth at the University of Nottingham The Iron Bridge (Harcourt Brace 1998) is a mixture of a historical novel and a science fiction novel, an uneasy combination that has been attempted before -- and which in this case very nearly works.
two genres - historical writing and science fiction writing --by taking a character, Maggie Foster, from the future (in this case from the year 2043 AD) and transferring her back through our own time to the past, specifically the year 1779 AD, the opening of the Coalkbrookdale Iron Bridge. Her mission is to stop the building of the Iron Bridge, the greatest symbol of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Why? The aim is no less than to divert the whole global industrialization process into more humane, environmentally- friendly channels, thus saving the World from its hideous environmental catastrophe of a future, ‘the greatest extinction since the Cretaceous era’ (432). H’mm : seems to ascribe a lot of historical importance to a single iron bridge. It is therefore intended to be of immediate interest to science fiction readers and to historians - but does it contain too much science fiction for the historians and too much History for the science fiction readers ? Morse certainly knows his History. He evokes a haunting, vibrant and sinister Coalbrookdale at the height of its iron pioneering era in the late 18th century . He peoples it with realistic portrayals of historical characters . Abraham Darby III is sympathetically portrayed as meditative, melancholy, and haunted : ‘....painfully earnest....and he was shy, which struck Maggie as being at odds with the prominent role he would play in building the bridge and with the fact that at the age of 23 he was in charge of the World’s largest ironworks’ ‘. His rival John ‘Iron Mad’ Wilkinson is portrayed as bumptious, assertive, bullying and devious: ‘John Wilkinson had long ago decided there was more money to be got from scheming than from iron making’ . It becomes obvious very quickly that these are caricatures: we must accept that Abraham Darby is our designated ‘good guy’ -- melancholic but nobly motivated, working hard to live up to the good, decent Quaker creed. Wilkinson, on the other hand, is just as clearly our designated bad guy. He comes across as the traditional pantomime villain - one feels encouraged to hiss whenever he appears. Like all great villains, he is bad and revels in it. He hates the successful Quakers in a gloomy, brooding Grendelian way. He tricks his father into bankruptcy. He juggles the accounts to get rid of his partners once they have served their purpose of financing him. He sells sub-standard cannon .He steals the ‘boring bar’ breakthrough from poor little Sniggy Oakes. He manipulates the Patent Office. He betrays his co-conspirator Anthony Bacon. He believes ‘ War was the natural condition of man. Easier to maintain than peace. Peace required patience and craft : war required only jealousy and vengeance....If he could not get an heir, he would get another fortune’’. (96) He comes equipped, almost inevitably, with ‘a shrill demonic laugh’ (281) -- and Morse supplies him with suitable sexual proclivities, too. It is obvious whom we are supposed to like (-- The Quakers are referred to by their first names : Wilkinson is never ‘John’). Ironically, Morse does better with his minor historical characters, whom he uses to add background authenticity but whom he does not need to develop beyond thumbnail sketch level. We see Matthew Boulton, for example, who ‘wore an assurance that Wilkinson had never acquired - the invisible, affable cloak of old wealth......a big hearty fellow like himself, but better liked -- for reasons that escaped Wilkinson....and a gentle humour that cushioned the quickness of his mind ‘‘.(137). Boulton’s young partner James Watt is introduced to us as a shifty, impatient genius: when we are first introduced to him it is through his ‘sardonic slash of a smile....He looked a bit like a monkey, although said to be absolutely the most brilliant of the young Scottish engineers now invading England ’ ‘(138). Josiah Wedgwood is described as ‘a cherubic man precisely dressed in a blue-and-white waistcoat. He resembled one of his own porcelain cups, his wooden leg painted in the same blue-and-white scene. ’ (204). Dr Erasmus Darwin ‘was a great bear of a fellow with rumpled clothing, an old scratch wig tied up in a little bobtail and a pocked face nearly buried in his sloping shoulders’ (205). Morse comes close to irritating the reader by including almost everyone he can in a ‘who’s who’ of the period : Abraham Darby, John Wilkinson, Richard Reynolds, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Anthony Bacon of Cyfarthfa, Dud Dudley, Thomas Newcomen, the Goldneys of Bristol, Thomas Farnolls Prichard, John Woolman, the bankers David Barclay and Sampson Lloyd, the Dutch iron master Verbruggens, Dr Priestley, Joseph Smeaton, the other Quaker iron master families of Coalbrookdale (the Thomases, the Roses and the Fords). One is somehow reminded of old Hollywood films. Any film that is set in the Elizabethan era has to include a scene in which someone asks: “Who is that little bald man in the corner desperately scribbling away like that ?” Reply: “Oh just some country lad who thinks he can write plays. Will,um, Will Shakespeare, I think his name is.” The director just couldn’t leave Shakespeare out. This ‘honorable mention’ temptation quickly becomes tedious to read, even if you know who these people are - one soon finds oneself wondering who is coming next : George III, Jane Austin, a young Napoleon Bonaparte perhaps ? Yet as historical writing, this is better than average, and in places very good. Ironically, it is not as original nor as enjoyable as science fiction yet it is the future that Morse describes better than the past. There is little original in it : there has been a Malthusian crisis, oil wars and ecological disaster. A few survivalist settlements are holding on, but fading. Our central figure, Maggie Foster, is a research worker in one of them, Ecosophia . Her return to the past is unconvincing : ‘She let herself relax into the alpha state necessary for subparticalization. Floating as an energy field was like drifting in a fog : you had no reference points, no clues as to direction in time or place. The only means of steering a course was to hold an image in your mind -- tiny and indistinct at first, growing as you got closer. Seat-of-the- pants navigation, Paul called it. Such was the state of time travel in 2043 : an experimental process that combined quantum physics and stochastic resonance, patched together with a little bootleg Jungian psychology’ (2). A little of this sort of thing goes a long way. I’m afraid the writers of ‘Dr Who’ did a better job with his Tardis over 30 years ago. Yet the survivalist landscape of the future, so reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, has a haunting quality to it. Here there is a risk of being cute, of teasing the reader about our time and our future and I think Morse makes this mistake a couple of times : the first comes as early as the second page. In referring to the bridge he says ‘’ Because its importance was clear from the very beginning, and because it remained standing well into the 21st century, it offered an unbroken link between the past and the present’ (2). There is deliberate ambiguity or at least untidy writing here : Is it still standing in Maggie’s time, or if not then what had happened to it ? Yet Maggie’s home time is wonderfully evoked. There is a reference to her father wearing an ‘I Support Our Troops In Texico’ T-shirt (31), hypermutating retro-viruses (31), psychophysicists (57), bending energy fractiles (58), corpo-democracies (61), photovoltaics (62), punishment veeries and reward veeries (80), electronic child abuse (81), nomadic motogangs and pleasure dome bunkers (308). The worsening environmental crisis is described like this : ‘’To Maggie, those big puffy stratocumulus clouds piled high in the northwestern sky signaled a high-pressure front moving in from the North Atlantic. They were spectacular. From a satellite they would have appeared as ragged crescents of white wandering across the British Isles - to judge from archival satellite photos she had seen from the 1970s.( By 1990, the view was not nearly as clear, needing computer enhancements : and by the time Maggie was receiving her training in 2034, she had to compuhance with false color just to distinguish land masses) ‘ (311). The Quakers loom large in ‘The Bridge’. Morse is a Quaker, so am I -- and I’m left wondering how the 18th Century Friends are being perceived by non-Quaker readers. How are we ‘going over’ to them -- as sanctimonious hypocrites ? Abraham Darby the First borrows money from his cousins even though he knows full well it is derived from piracy and the slave trade. Abraham Darby II, when he gains control of his father’s ironworks, continues to build canon for three years despite his pacifism because the survival of the Dale Company Ironworks depends on it. Abraham Darby III is similarly tempted . When he discusses with his brother-in-law (also a Friend) the immorality of profiting from general wartime conditions, asking him ‘And yet thou didst profit indirectly from the war, didst thou not ?” he receives the reply : ‘Aye, yes. As did the whole Gorge. And as thou wilt profit from this one. A rising tide carries all boats’. ‘Profit, yes ‘. Abraham nodded, thinking those were almost Wilkinson’s words. ‘Still, as a Quaker I should prefer not to’.The declaration rang false. He knew he would not forsake the profits -- not when the bridge was going to strain his every resource’. As a Quaker I would not recommend this book to anyone interested in the Quakers merely for Morse’s portrayal of our ancestors. As a parent I would not like my child to read it until well into the teenage years ; the sex is not essential and is unnecessarily crude. As science fiction it is competent but not up with the leaders : Morse is no Isaac Azimov, no Arthur C. Clarke, no John Wyndham . As a History teacher I would not have it as a set book : it’s too crowded, too cluttered -- and because of its fatal flaw. And yet I enjoyed reading it and I’ve been thinking about it since - and mentioning it to other people. And recommending it to them, too. And the ones who have enjoyed it most have been Quakers. But for me it was flawed from the beginning -- and this has robbed me of a lot of its possible enjoyment. The idea that destroying a symbol such as the Iron Bridge could have diverted History is silly, if not somewhat preposterous. It is one of the most facile of the counter-factual propositions I have heard recently, and there have been many. Many far more interesting, valid ones. What if Columbus had died young? What if Alexander he Great had been killed early ? What if Lee had won at Gettysburg? What if the US Navy had lost at Midway? But these all relate to people and their contributions. The Iron Bridge was not a decisive person. It was a symbol of something that had already started: industrialization was well underway by 1779 . It had already developed a power that was reshaping the World, a momentum that even the French Revolution could not stop. The Bridge may have impressed many people - as it certainly did - but they were being impressed by present accomplishments, not inspired to do better. As a bridge, it rendered itself obsolete the moment it was completed. If this Bridge had never existed there would have been another one soon enough. For all Morse’s vague talk of a butterfly’s flight in China causing hurricanes thousands of miles away, History just isn’t that simple. And it certainly isn’t that alterable. ‘ Directory: papers papers -> From Warfighters to Crimefighters: The Origins of Domestic Police Militarization papers -> The Tragedy of Overfishing and Possible Solutions Stephanie Bellotti papers -> Prospects for Basic Income in Developing Countries: a comparative Analysis of Welfare Regimes in the South papers -> Weather regime transitions and the interannual variability of the North Atlantic Oscillation. Part I: a likely connection papers -> Fast Truncated Multiplication for Cryptographic Applications papers -> Reflections on the Industrial Revolution in Britain: William Blake and J. M. W. Turner papers -> This is the first tpb on this product papers -> Basic aspects of hurricanes for technology faculty in the United States papers -> Title Software based Remote Attestation: measuring integrity of user applications and kernels Authors Download 47.36 Kb. Share with your friends:
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