Mortality Bridge
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15
Ratings1
Average rating3
Decades ago a young rock & blues guitarist and junkie named Niko signed in blood on the dotted line and in return became the stuff of music legend. But when the love of his damned life grows mortally and mysteriously ill he realizes he's lost more than he bargained for-and that wasn't part of the Deal. So Niko sets out on a harrowing journey from the streets of Los Angeles through the downtown subway tunnels and across the red-lit plain of the most vividly realized Hell since Dante, to play the gig of his mortgaged life and win back the purloined soul of his lost love. MORTALITY BRIDGE remixes Orpheus, Dante, Faust, the Crossroads legend, and more, in a beautiful, brutal-and surprisingly funny-quest across a Hieronymous Bosch landscape of myth, music, and mayhem; and across an inner terrain of addiction, damnation, and redemption. MORTALITY BRIDGE has won the 2011 Emperor Norton Award for Best Novel.
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What motivates a demon? One problem with modern retellings of the classics is that they have to face the fact that Hell is a silly concept. An embarrassing, pathetic, shameful human idea that we really should just get over. Mortality Bridge doesn't address this. In fact it savors Hell, spending hundreds of pages describing agonies and senseless suffering. Boyett seems to relish the idea of billions of souls condemned to eternal pain merely for having had their brains wired a certain way during their mortal lives. He seems to enjoy inventing gruesome punishments and describing them in extreme detail. No reasons are given for being condemned: Niko encounters many generally-considered-as-good, none of whom know why. This Hell contains even young children. What mind other than a human one could conceive of that?
I kept reading because there were glimmers of hope: occasional signs of compassion and kindness. I hoped those were hints of a rewarding resolution of the this-has-always-just-been-in-you variety or just anything unexpected. No such luck. The finale is just yet more superstition dressed in modern clothing.
Boyett's Orpheus Niko is tiresome. A superhero Mary Sue: guitar hero, kung-fu fighter, noble gentleman, able to walk for miles on shredded feet and no caloric intake, to outrun and outwit all challenges. Dabbed with faint tempera-paint flaws that are only shown in past tense as contrast to how friggin' awesome he is now. Convenient Deus(Diabolo?) ex Machina every chapter or two with (eventually) the shallowest of explanations.
The writing is often lovely: well tuned, vivid, meticulously crafted. It's just, well, the content. It's not worth it. At least not if you share my sensibilities.
