One of my favoritist books evar

If you get to know me in person and ever ask about what fantasy/science fiction book I'd recommend, without hesitation, I will almost always remember to mention Bridge Of Birds by Barry Hughart. It's absolutely one of my favorite books. Lets get into why.

First off, it's Chinese mythology. I've been into Chinese myths since I became aware of them while living in Singapore. There's a character of over-the-top-ness that Chinese myths have that the rest of the world simply fails at. It's incredibly lurid. The only people I can think of who get close are Millennialist Christians, and they take themselves far too seriously. Chinese myths are constantly making fun of either other myths, or themselves.

Bridge Of Birds was the first, and best book in which I realized that, wow, this could make for some great contemporary books. I cannot count the number of Norse or British myths that were re-worked into some sort of fairy tale, sometimes woven in with Native American myths, blah blah blah. It's not to say that visionaries like Charles DeLindt, Pam Dean or Emma Bull, are doing anything boring. But after a while, I can only take so much of the western perspective before it looses it's sparkle.

Barry Hughart understands on a deep level how the structure of Chinese myths blur into each other. Bridge of Birds has a fairly tale telling us that some elements that the main character takes as legend based on reality are hokum, but that other parts of reality are mythic and beautiful.

The heroes are a strong but shy, and clumsy pesant named Number Ten Ox, who's intentionaly obsequious manner actually shows a remarkable understanding and acceptance of class issues, and a drunken decrepit genius, Li Kao. They're off on a bog-standard quest to find a cure for Ox's village children, who were accidentally poisoned by the village pawnbroker and his companion in crime.

The book is heavy with cons and tricks. Li Kao and Number Ten ox trick themselves in and out of trouble on a constant basis. I've always had a fondness for the con-man as hero. Perhaps it's a drive to see something redeemable and heroic show up in someone that able to trick people out of money.

The search for a cure, which is in the form of sections of a ginseng root that ends up being the physical manifestation of a Goddess meshes it's self with the quest to reunite a pair of (literally) star crossed lover-gods.

Beyond the plot, which is fun, but not too unique, the prose style, pacing, and sheer joy in the story are what really make the book work so well for me. Hughart is an absolute master of the well crafted sentence that evokes his subject matter, and the feelings of his narrator. There's a cadence to the words that's sheer brilliance. Some authors I know tend to go for the "transparent prose" concept as vitally important. Or "grown up". To which I cheerfully make childlike faces at, and point to the XKCD comic that displays my attitude on it.

I like good prose that is constructed in a conscious way that enjoys the flow of words, and uses them as a lens to focus the readers attention on a story. I like sentences and paragraphs that are so close to poetry that you get somehow distracted from the story because the flow of the words is so pretty. The funny thing is that I don't like poetry as much as I like near poetic sentences in a novel.

Bridge Of Birds is quite close to poetry.

Finally, the various plot elements are really simple, and well crafted. The emotional issues that are dealt with are easy to grasp, classic dilemmas and action scenes. There's chase scenes, escape scenes, puzzle solving, confrontations, and dramatic bad guys. The end scene, that I won't spoil for you, is a no-holds-barred schmaltz fest. I loved it. It's rare that a writer has both the guts to go with such blatant emotional pulling, and has the chops to pull it off in a way that's both cognizant of what the story is doing, and gleeful in it's exploration of it. Horror writers do it well when trying to scare people, and romance novels do it well when talking about love, but the climax scenes of so many fantasy novels are not really blockbusters so much these days. Sometimes I miss that.