Bright's Passage by Scott Ritter

This is part of one of my stranger lists, the "read-alikes" suggest by NoveList. I took my top ten lists from each of the last five years, and picked one book from the recommendations for each. In many cases, I haven't loved the read-alike, for reasons I'll go into, but once, just once, a read-alike for a book on one year's Top Ten list made it on to the following year's Top Ten list. So I persist.

I mostly persist because I loved Roger Ebert's style of reviewing movies, and I find this particular grouping of books a very strong object lesson in Ebert's Law - that a movie is not what it is about, but how it is about it. The same is true for books, and in nearly every case, I can see why NoveList picked a book as a "read-alike," but in every case, the end result is very different. The books tend to have plot elements in common, but oh, they couldn't be more dissimilar.

So imagine my puzzlement when I sat down with Bright's Passage and tried to figure out why in the world NoveList had thrown this up as a read-alike to Salman Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life, which is a book I absolutely loved. Eventually, I determined that it must be because, very loosely, both are about a main character going on a journey with a motley crew, including some talking animals. Which, yes. They have that in common.

Other than that, though? Virtually nothing. Rushdie's book is joyous and exuberant (but made me cry), untidy in its sheer energy bringing in so many references to so many things. There's a delight and expansiveness, even as Luka is working to save his father's life, which is very high stakes indeed, and taken seriously.  Where Rushdie's book opens its metaphorical arms to welcome the whole world in, Bright's Passage is narrower, darker, and dingier.

I do realize that Josh Ritter's book was at a disadvantage, starting out with Luka hanging over its shoulder, daring the book to be as good. It's not. It's not terrible either, but it ended up being very much not my cup of tea. There's a little too much withheld, and far too much of women just being there to enhance the main character's story - not as sex partners, which is a nice change of pace, but as potential mothers to Bright's infant son.

The book seems to be about the after effects of war, in this case, the First World War. Bright went away to war. When he came back, he stole/liberated his cousin from her father's house (where, it's insinuated but never said, she was abused by either her father or her brothers or both) and married her. She dies in childbirth just before the opening pages of the book.  We go back and forth between Bright's time in France and his first days with his son. Which are heavily influenced by his horse, talking to him.

Bright believes that an angel he saw on the ceiling of a church in France is in the horse, and the horse is the one who convinced him to free his wife. If the wife had a name, I don't remember it, which isn't great. The horse claims that the baby is the future King of Heaven, and for a while, Bright does what the horse tells him, even though burning down his house, as the horse demands, sets a devastating forest fire.

Ahead of the fire, Bright goes to a small town, and tries to find a new mother for his son, at the horse's command. He also takes a non-talking goat with him. It's unclear whether or not Bright is just hallucinating voices, but in many ways it seems likely, particularly since the horse/angel seems to be wrong about just about everything. Of course, so is Bright.  The horse wants Bright to make every woman he sees the baby's mother, but Bright is slightly more discerning. Which doesn't mean that's not what he's looking for too.

I think my biggest problem is that this just doesn't seem to come to much. Bright does eventually resolve things with his angel, but that leaves his war experience and the encroaching fire and his grief over his wife and his future life with his son open-ended questions, not to be resolved in this book. It feels like it's an artsy ending, but I didn't find it a satisfying one.

It's not surprising that a book about war and about poverty in rural areas and evil family members has no lightness about it. (Bright's uncle, who is never named such, just "The Colonel," is close to a cartoonish villain, aiming to take his grandson back from the man he thinks killed his child.) But if it comes to a comparison, the way Luka and the Fire of Life could encompass both joy and sorrow is a large part of what makes it, even now, loom large in my memory. This is just sorrow, and it's okay, but I wouldn't really recommend it.