Historical Fiction

Christina Rauh Fishburne: The Bridge That Would Not Burn – A Pardonsburg Novella (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

In the Washington, DC, of 1880, the past has rented a room upstairs. It descends into the parlor bearing the countenance of a former Confederate soldier, and Charlotte Worthington must decide how much of its troubled eloquence she will admit into her life. Christina Rauh Fishburne’s The Bridge That Would Not Burn makes historical fiction an intimate predicament: preservation acquires a voice, then addresses a woman whose own words rarely survive her hearth. Between them, the distance separating an event from its aftermath begins to buckle. For readers today, accustomed to encountering the past as an argument already furnished with conclusions, such proximity offers a useful discomposure. We enter a room where the consequences are still taking shape. First issued in installments and now fully illustrated, this novella occupies a passage between A Pardonsburg Songbook (Sabr Tooth Tiger Press, 2026) and the as-yet-unpublished Ballad, carrying its unfinished human reckonings into a larger imaginative country.

Charlotte is someone who consigns her words to flames, pressing ink into page but never capitulating to the allure of permanence. There is a curious sovereignty in this practice. Her thoughts may exist without becoming evidence against her, and the fire grants her a privacy that the social world would scarcely know how to honor. She tolerates the hobnobbery of that world only by the skin of her teeth, enduring it for the company of her sole friend. Beneath that impatience resides the difficulty of possessing an inward life while being perpetually available for outward appraisal. Charlotte represents a consciousness trying to reserve some portion of itself from the arrangements made on its behalf. At a magic show, she is taken into new directions of self-inquiry by a diversion beyond the stage: Lieutenant Thomas Atchison, an associate of her father and the lodger upstairs, whose enigmatic presence has landed within orbit more often than she would wish. The performance lends an apt frame to an acquaintance in which attention itself becomes a questionable art.

Not long after, she encounters him reading a book in her home’s parlor, where their conversation assumes the potentially fatal tapdance of predator and prey feeling each other out. Charlotte is both intrigued and severely put off by his countenance. Her misgivings have a bodily intelligence; curiosity, meanwhile, advances with the mortifying confidence of an uninvited guest who already knows where the silver is kept. As she talks to him more, those machinations of interest begin to loosen their hold. Fishburne attends to this yielding without rendering Charlotte’s resistance foolish. The very effort of interpreting Atchison brings her into closer acquaintance with her own desires, whose obscurity may be as vexing as his. Atchison’s speech and mannerisms are just as tactile as Charlotte’s, bringing vivid color to the novella’s already-rich atmosphere. Their exchanges give thought a surface upon which it can bruise.

Little by little, Atchison picks up shards of his traumatic war experiences, turns them in his mind’s hands, and reveals them to Charlotte. His unnamed illness lends further uncertainty to a presence whose legendary past has already preceded him into the room. Yet legend is a poor vessel for the broken particularity of memory. The man Charlotte privately calls the Mysterious Irritant carries experiences that resist the finish of a well-told anecdote, and his revelations disturb the composure with which the household might otherwise accommodate him. His Confederate past gives this intimacy an uneasy historical weight. Sympathy encounters a moral stumbling block here: suffering may invite tenderness while leaving the cause in whose service it was endured answerable to judgment. Atchison can thus be read as an embodiment of history’s troublesome persistence within private affection. Through him, the old war reaches into Charlotte’s present, asking for a response she cannot borrow from the etiquette of the parlor.

Some parts of her hold on to indifference, while others fling themselves into surrender. At one point, we are told, “She tried to read his face, but she never did have an eye or ear for other languages.” The remark catches the strangeness of an intimacy conducted in a tongue neither participant can confidently translate. As Charlotte finds herself knee-deeper in the muck of social propriety, especially during a pivotal Christmas party, the sheer, overwhelming familiarity of her life grows into a massive entity of ennui that threatens to consume her. One imagines its enormous body folded impossibly into the room, feeding upon every gesture that has been performed before. When she shares a dance with Atchison, that life takes on a newness she had previously caught only in glimpses. The movement affords her a momentary experience of possibility, though the question of what that possibility will cost remains suspended between them.

With multiple potential suitors in view, Charlotte has a war of her own to wage across the battlefield of her stubborn heart. Her eventual verbal showdown with Atchison takes on a Bennet-Darcy-esque tit for tat, although the pleasure of their antagonism rests upon more than verbal agility. Each risks allowing the other’s interpretation to become authoritative. Charlotte’s tenacity protects her against that surrender even as it complicates her pursuit of understanding. Emotions continue to stew within as divisions take shape without, until a series of dramatic events, the rollercoaster of which I will leave for the reader to ride, changes the game significantly for both parties and beyond. The widening consequences prevent their courtship, if courtship it is, from becoming a sealed chamber whose occupants can mistake their feelings for the whole world.

The chimney sweep girl accused of stealing from the Worthington home is especially consequential to that widening. Her precarious place beside Charlotte’s more sheltered uncertainty brings questions of credibility into the same house as questions of desire. Who receives the leisure of being furtive? Whose obscurity becomes grounds for accusation? Such disparities lend the historical setting a pressure that readers today can readily recognize, particularly when reputation is allowed to stand in for knowledge. As Charlotte seeks to untangle secrets in the shadows of the world she thought she knew, she begins to realize her place in it. Troubles gather there with arms coiled and ready to strike, serpents inhabiting the dark recesses of an accustomed dwelling. The vagaries of human folly, in some of its most wicked and deceptive forms, leave us wondering what might have been. That speculation also exposes how much of anyone’s life depends upon the stories others have the power to make credible.

Fishburne’s gift for language seems almost to have arrived from another time. Her words follow the discipline of a fine recipe, balancing umami and proper mouthfeel with the utmost attention to the reader’s palate. The pleasure has substance: the texture of a phrase can make an inward hesitation perceptible before even its speaker has understood it. Historical fiction acquires its relevance through just such acts of attention, restoring uncertainty to lives that hindsight is forever threatening to simplify. Charlotte’s burning pages offer a final, stranger consideration. We ask the past to yield its testimony, yet she claims the right to withdraw hers; her little furnace unsettles our appetite for possession. Perhaps a bridge that would not burn must bear something beyond the weight of remembrance. It might carry the permission to cease repeating what has been inherited, leading toward a country whose absence from every map is its first promise: a future in which our descendants owe us nothing.

Paul Griffiths: Mr. Beethoven (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

If fiction is the art of revivification, then let Mr. Beethoven be one of the most self-aware products of its wonders. The 2021 novel from Paul Griffiths grafts archival leaves to branches of nourishing speculation to imagine a journey the German composer might have taken in 1833 (six years after his death) to America to finish an oratorio on the Biblical figure of Job.

Although the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston indeed considered commissioning such a work, the only motif of it we will ever know may be articulated in the mind’s ear as we read of its stumbling fruition and premiere. Written in a narratively and stylistically episodic style and using only statements recorded as having been uttered by Der Spagnol, it unfolds not unlike his Ninth Symphony, building a dome’s worth of clouds one wisp at a time until the light of something divine pushes its way through to illuminate the ground at our feet anew.

If any of this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it’s too true to be good. Whereas the “real” Beethoven—as if the persona of that name weren’t already enigmatized by our constant recapitulations—reads to us today like the quintessential poète maudit, he marks the zoetrope of this book in moments of pandering frustration but also, more importantly, cadenzas of openheartedness, interpersonal profundity, and sheer delight.

Hints of a holistic portrait shade the opening act, wherein we encounter Beethoven as an enigma aboard a ship in the Atlantic bound for New England. He is a figure rendered by charcoal in intercontinental candlelight rather than oil in the Roman sun. “A stare, from a stranger,” we are told, “can be a flooding of humanity through whatever dams of difference.” Thus, we see and feel through the eyes of characters as fleeting as their target’s evergreen status. Such moments point to one of the novel’s most brilliant aggregations of historical impulse in Griffiths’s ability to articulate Beethoven before his place in the canon, itself in flux at this point, was assured by the validation of hindsight. By the same token, it emphasizes the unique disjointedness of place one experiences at sea before making landfall in realms of emotional economy. Says the muse of takeaways: Recognition is never universal.

By the time he gets to Boston, Beethoven’s dishevelment reads not like a caricature of the man but as the ravages of a harrowing journey. When encountering subsequent dramatis personae, we view them as he does: in his polite disinterest in Lowell Mason (responsible for the commission), in his enjoyment of Quincy under the auspices of hostess Mrs. Hannah Hill (a widow in whose company the bee legs of his heart collect no small amount of pollen), in his disappointment with the Reverend Ballou (a dismal librettist whose failures end up provoking a textual revival), and in his enchantment with Thankful (a sign language teacher and interpreter variously dubbed his “ear” and “amanuensis”). Every instance in which Herr Beethoven shakes a hand, exchanges words, or consumes a morsel of food reinforces the illusion that the music is imminent.

Each chapter is a composition unto itself. Whether in his iridescent vignette on the Fourth of July or in the careful construction of possible yet unprovable interactions, Griffiths sews his story with a leitmotif of concerns that make it clear he is wrestling as much as we are with the implications of his reality. While Chapter 32 is almost entirely footnotes, 33 only dialogue with dynamic markings, and 38 a single run-on sentence, these artifices never feel out of place or contrived. Each is a libretto unto itself for a musical work yet to be written.

From the selection of voices to travails with the local punditry, the story arc is pulled like a shuttle through looms marked by clefs instead of wooden frames, culminating in a virtuoso performance from musicians and Griffiths alike, as the author provides a full text for the oratorio, interleaved with reflections such as:

“To this Boston audience, the music is untoward, beyond familiar reference points, and yet at the same time wondrous, perhaps most of all in its successions of harmonies, how they float, swerve or dive while also proceeding forward inexorably, how they keep their sights on that one sure path while sometimes veering to the side or soaring high above, carrying their first listeners into new air.”

The book’s constant fourth-wall breaking may be its greatest pleasure. At one point, Griffiths even invites us to call him out on his conceit, only to retreat further into its fascinating depths. Hanging on what-might-have-beens (“it could all so easily have gone a different way,” “Scraps of paper might have survived,” etc.), he is content to vary his approach to the theme at hand as a seasoned improviser at the keyboard.

Among the many things to adore about Mr. Beethoven is that it sidesteps the trap of forcing a creative swoon. Unlike The Agony and the Ecstasy, whose Michelangelo rhapsodizes in the presence of unhewn marble, itself a cipher for escape, we get none of the romantic privilege of the artist at work. Hints of influences, witting or not, also make this a joyful effort. Top notes of James Cowan’s A Mapmaker’s Dream and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and a splash of Umberto Eco in the middle make way for a powerful dry down that leaves plenty of room for Griffiths’s base notes to settle in the nose for the long haul. In the latter vein, nods to his own work (“Let me tell you,” says Mrs. Hill at one point, naming his Ophelia novel) remind us of who is telling the story. Setting aside such comparisons leaves us with a three-dimensional object to regard in the light of our hopeful imaginations. The more we turn the key, the more it can sing when we let go. 

Like the composer, we hear nothing yet feel every note.

Mr. Beethoven is available from New York Review Books (pictured below) for those in the U.S. or from Henningham Family Press (pictured above) for those in Europe.