Book review: Across the Bridge by Morag Joss

IN ANY catastrophe, people disappear. But as well as those who lose their lives, there just might be some for whom a massive human tragedy offers the chance of an escape from their old life and the hope of a new one, unfettered by their previous identity.

This, at least, lies at the heart of Ayrshire-raised Morag Joss’s seventh novel, which has already garnered praise across the pond on US publication earlier this year.

When Annabel – a name she adopts in memory of a child who died under her own mother’s care many years ago – discovers during a break in the Scottish Highlands that she herself is pregnant, her new husband is less than enthused. She can have a future with him, or she can have her child – but not both. As Col embarks on another day of canoeing without his devastated wife, she sets off in their hire car, making intermittent stops both to give in to her incessant morning sickness and to surrender to emotional desperation at the prospect of the decision she has to make

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On that same day, there is a catastrophic bridge collapse. Many lose their lives, and images show the hire car in which Annabel had left the hotel that morning pulling onto the bridge seconds before it crumbled. She is assumed amongst the missing.

If Annabel wants a new life, then this is her opportunity. She acts on instinct, and, hungry and exhausted, stumbles towards a trailer perched on waste ground on the edge of the river, which is still buzzing with search helicopters and police divers seeking survivors. Inside the trailer is Silva, a twenty-something illegal immigrant whose husband and young daughter have not returned that night to their makeshift home.

Annabel is a night-time intruder in their home, and Silva initially greets her as such, but as the defensive kicks subside, she recognises in Annabel a woman in trouble who needs some company and support as much as she does herself. What Silva does not know is that her life and Annabel’s are already tragically entwined, and that this needy stranger whom she has taken in already knows that Silva’s family will never come home.

Far from putting distance between herself and the scene of her “death”, Annabel finds herself living only a stone’s throw from the ruins of the bridge, amongst the mud and vagrants that, in their own way, each threaten to overrun the ramshackle shelter. And that, in essence, is Joss’s novel: these two women; one of them trying to escape a previous life; the other trying to cling to what’s left of hers. Added to that cast is Ron, a tortured loner who fell asleep at the wheel of a school bus some years ago, causing an accident in which children lost their lives, and who has, since his release from prison, spent his days driving around the country. Together, the three represent a rather over-done, but nonetheless poignant, quest for identity, for re-invention, for forgiveness and belonging.

Joss’ narrative is powerful and gripping. For even as the trio live, for a lengthy time towards the middle of the novel, in peaceful union, the weight of their secrets constantly threatens to capsize them. Across the Bridge is not a crime novel, but Joss’s roots in thriller writing are evident, and her skills are considerable. The problem is that it’s so hard to determine what it actually is, and whenever you think you have an answer, it seems to be straining to be something else. As a thriller, it delivers tension and suspense in bucket-loads, but there is rather too much emphasis on the emotional yearnings of the characters to make it feel quite like a thriller. As a tug-on-the-heartstrings novel, it also has moments of real success, but the often-overwritten dialogue and extreme situations can make it feel too contrived to be moving. There is an other-worldly quality to it, originating, no doubt, in the symbolism of the bridge and the river – the crossing between heaven and the underworld, with boatman Ron as a quasi-mythical Charon. But the danger is that the characters become representations of human nature instead of, rather than as well as, being real people. Sadly, it is into this trap that Morag Joss’s entrancing, but ultimately unfulfilling, novel falls.

Across the Bridge

By Morag Joss

Alma Books, 310 pp, £12.99