 Critically acclaimed writer Gregory Frost has been nominated for every major fantasy award. His latest novel Shadowbridge was released in January and will be concluded in Lord Tophet, due out in June. If you’re generally impatient for answers, wait for the sequel before setting out on this journey because not only does the first part end with one humdinger of a cliffhanger, it poses far more questions about this intriguing world than it answers. But whether you wait or jump in, this is one journey well worth the undertaking.
Shadowbridge is remarkable for several reasons, all of which would be worth discussing here, many of which have been commented on elsewhere: Frost's superb prose style, the Scheherazade motif of tales within tales, and so on. But what particularly struck me was the refreshing way in which that old fantasy chestnut, the Quest, is handled. For much of the novel Frost pursues a non-linear timeline that effectively challenges our jaded expectations of the fantasy Quest: we’re introduced to the novel’s sixteen year old protagonist, Leodora, well into her journey, return to her past, pick up the threads of a seemingly parallel tale about Diverus, a musician gifted by the gods, only to find ourselves back in Leodora’s present. Two thirds of the way through the novel we're back at the start!
More effective though is the subtlety with which Frost introduces the Quest theme into the story. For some time it’s not at all obvious that Leodora is in fact undertaking a quest. Although curious about her past, in particular the mysterious death of her parents, her journey is a flight away from a violent and brutally provincial past rather than a search for answers. Gradually, however, it dawns that we are undertaking the same journey as Leodora, one to understand the nature of her world.
Shadowbridge is a water world with a few islands and myriad interconnected bridges spiralling across an endless ocean. Distinct cultures have emerged over the ages, each occupying a span on one of the innumerable bridges, towns and cities built from the surface, level after level, down to the water. Rigid social hierarchies appear to exist everywhere, with the wealthy living in towns on the surface and the poorest of the poor inhabiting little more than floor space dangerously close to the water. If the purpose of a bridge is to allow passage from someplace to somewhere else, then these bridges have and have not lost something: they only lead to each other, having become both destination and route.
Cultures we encounter are suggestively familiar: Indian, Japanese, and so on, but there is an even stronger hint of a connection with our world. In one myth, the Story of Death, Chilingana dreams of a world with objects clearly identifiable as telephones and sky scrapers! What does it mean that the foundation myths of this fantasy world reference our reality as a dream? Is this our distant future after some ecological disaster that has caused the sea to rise to cover the face of the planet, sending us back to a pre-industrial state and somehow unleashing supernatural powers?
But then again maybe that’s a furphy. Shadowbridge, after all, is a world with two moons...
One intriguing mystery, and it may be a lynchpin to our understanding, is how travellers are able to understand a span’s language soon after arrival. Clearly they don't know the prevailing language when they arrive but then miraculously they acquire understanding. There is something imperfect in the process, the name of one Inn, “Eat this and have a cup of tea”, apparently losing something in translation. Is this process magic, divine intervention or hidden and ancient technology at work?
What we do know is that for the vast majority living in the world of Shadowbridge this is an unquestioned miracle.
Shadowbridge is a world in which gods and avatars manifest, in which ghosts travel the spans and through time, in which demons haunt and torment the living. All unexplained mysteries that in Frost’s masterful hands engage the reader. But in these hands there is a darker side too. The citizens of Shadowbridge live narrow, unquestioning lives confined to some small span or island, incurious about the origin of the bridges or the miracles that surround them. This almost wilful ignorance is a tyranny (deliberately imposed?, we might ask) that dominates their existence. The only explanations for any of this are given by the many diverse (and somewhat cryptic) myths, fragments of wisdom scattered here and there. Just stories.
Or is there more to them?
 If Leodora is unique it is the opportunity she has, and perhaps even her capacity, to understand the mysteries of her world. She is a shadow puppeteer, a travelling story teller, and already at her young age perhaps the greatest yet known. More than a story teller, though, Leodora is a collector of stories, constantly expanding her repertoire, absorbing the collective wisdom of the peoples she encounters as she journeys from one span to another. Each tale is a small piece of a puzzle which may, when fitted together with other pieces, explain the nature of this world. A collector and processor of data, her real talent is pattern recognition, and although her knowledge when we meet her is incomplete, she has already begun filling in the gaps.
Glimpsing the Truth.
Does this make her a threat to the conspicuously absent powers that be (whoever or whatever they might be)? Is this indeed why her parents died? Her father, after all, was the first to walk this particular path of knowledge.
While Frost’s story is threaded with metaphysical and philosophical issues, haunted by gods and avatars and a mysterious past that may or may not be linked to our own reality, it is the human condition that seems to concern him most. He gives us the wonderful and awesome exterior we’d expect of a fantasy world, but also takes us behind or below the surface to reveal the ugly material conditions of the majority. In the interstices of his fantasy, Frost depicts the suffering and mistreatment of others with an eye for truth that is at times confronting. There is anger here: anger at those who turn a blind eye to the suffering of others and for those who take their pleasure at another’s expense. And there is a warning to the oppressor too: the underdog will rise up, stronger for the mistreatment. Frost’s is a fantasy world, with all the magic, mystery and beauty we’d expect, but more interestingly it is one with a hard and sharp edge of truth.
The concluding novel, Lord Tophet, has much to live up to and it remains to be seen whether Frost succeeds in satisfactorily resolving the great library of questions already posed (perhaps a more difficult task than posing the questions), but given the excellent ground work of Shadowbridge I’m sure there are many expectant readers waiting for the sequel.
I can certainly be counted amongst their number.
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