The Suspension Bridge
In 1962, twenty-nine-year-old nun, Sister Harriet, an upper-year science teacher, is transferred to the upscale Saint Reginald’s Academy in Bothonville, a Canadian river city where a committee of municipal bigwigs is planning to build the largest bridge in the world. Along with male teacher Marin Montserrat, Harriet is given oversight of the school bridge building competition, for which she feels ill-equipped, but begins to have feelings for the rather dishy Marin. Amongst their student group are the three Ls – Laura, Loretta and Laurentine, who outshine, not just academically, all the other students. Harriet, confused by her errant feelings about Marin and her godly vocation, is assigned by the mother superior as amanuensis to the bishop on the Bridge Oversight Committee. From there she is tasked with a clandestine mission to neighbouring Carson Falls, to spy on its endeavours to build its own bridge.
Described as part comic allegory and part fairy tale, the eponymous bridge, with its Gothic architecture (the bishop insists it must not be Romanesque!) extending starkly to the heavens, features a daring curved span via a downstream island rich with serpentine chrysotile deposits, to the invisible far shore, wherever that may be. The bridge is visible in the reader’s imagination, yet not so; Harriet encounters a pink mist when she scales its unfinished heights one evening; blurry figures are seen at the bridge’s crown. Then the three Ls go missing one after the other. As Harriet struggles to untangle the mystery of the students, she deliberately disobeys the Order rules, determined to find herself. Dowdall’s tale exhibits recognisable facets of Canadian life, and is perhaps a wryly dark cautionary tale against the steep price of unchecked hubris. This will appeal to readers of allegorical and speculative fiction.
