Reviewed by Ruth Latta
The Suspension Bridge:
a Sister Harriet mystery,
by Anna Dowdall
Radiant Press
October 2024, Paperback, 343 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1998926121
The Suspension Bridge, Anna Dowdall’s latest novel, is an historical mystery with greater depths than the average who-done-it. It takes place in 1962-63, the era of shift dresses, pea coats and folk-songs like “Greenfields.” Pope John XXIII has founded the Second Vatican Council (1961-5) to modernize the Roman Catholic Church, and, in the United States, the Civil Rights movement has begun.
In late summer, 1962, twenty-nine year old Sister Harriet (nee Ruth Savary) is on a train to Bothonville, a St. Lawrence Seaway city, to take up a teaching position at a Catholic girls’ school, St. Reginald’s Academy. Approaching the town, she sees from the train window a high suspension bridge being built. This work in progress seems to give off a vibe of “violence and attractiveness that beckon like an evil friend.”
Perhaps the ominous feeling stems from Harriet’s mixed feelings about Bothonville. Born there, she’d lived there with her parents until her father left the family. She grew up in a town near Montreal, but when her mother became ill, she was sent to Bothonville to live with her married sister. At age seventeen, she entered her order, went to university, earning two degrees and a teaching certificate.
Sister Harriet feels guilty about taking the position at St. Reginald Academy because she has lost her faith. Most of her life has been lived under the wing of the Church, though, so this elite school seems to be the logical next step. Also, she needs the job.
Shortly after Sister Harriet’s arrival, Mother Perpetua assigns her to co-supervise a bridge-building competition at school. Students who read up on bridge construction the previous year are building model bridges. Harriet’s co-supervisor of the project is a dashingly handsome, charming lay teacher, Marin Montserrat. Most of the girls develop crushes on him, and Harriet does too, to an extent. Among the students involved in the model bridge project are three gorgeous, bright young Grade Thirteen girls, Loretta, Laurentine and Laura, known as the “three L’s.” Their clique has a junior follower named Ella. To Sister Harriet, the four seem like “co-conspirators.”
The school competition is a way of celebrating the bridge construction project that has excited Bothonville residents, who are convinced that everyone in town will benefit from it. A nearby town, Carson Falls, also has a bridge project going on, and both cities hope for funding from Bernard Slade, CEO of Salamander Holdings. His company owns Salamander Island, which is rich in serpentine crystallite deposits, and he needs a bridge to market the mineral.
On the request of eighty-one-year-old Bishop Aloysius. Sister Harriet becomes his substitute as diocesan representative on the Bothonville Bridge Design Committee, a group of civic leaders including the mayor and police chief. Readers are told that when the bishop learned that Harriet was coming to Bothonville he regarded it as a sign, but of what we aren’t told, His paternal interest in Harriet puzzles her, but she is clear on his main goal. He wants the bridge to be of Gothic design to lift people’s eyes to heaven.
The Committee assigns Harriet to find out what deal, if any, exists between Carsonville and Salamander Holdings. She meets with a teacher in Carsonville, Brother Cyprian, who is on the Carsonville committee. As she gets to know him, she learns that he too has religious doubts, and they become friends.
Then, to the horror of Mother Perpetua and the entire school, the the 3 L’s disappear, one by one. When the twenty-one-year-old brother of a scholarship student is charged with a crime, Harriet breaks many rules in trying to solve the mystery.
Harriet is a multi-dimensional character with human frailties who notices others’ idiosyncrasies. In her view, for instance, a local parish priest is a “fretful individual who spent as little time as possible [at St. Reginald’s] owing to a fear of girls.” She tries to help the disadvantaged, hoping to bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots, but is not always successful. Indeed, she comes to question the value of a St. Reginald’s education, after hearing the feelings of a scholarship student. The student says that the education she’s receiving gives girls like her “something precious,” but that it will be like a fancy box that gets heavier every year as she fails to live up to her education. Class and other barriers make it hard for young women of humble beginnings to rise in the world.
Among the fascinating, complex characters is the bridge itself. Early on, Sister Harriet feels that it has “intentionality, a life of its own.” It lures her into climbing its spiral staircase in a fog. She feels its curves “pulse invitingly,” and, at the top, she seems to be “bobbing in a candy floss of paradise…a giant causeway leading to infinite lightness, infinity itself.” It often hums quietly to itself, but can also sound like “one hundred philharmonic orchestras.” Does it lift people’s eyes to heaven, as Bishop Aloysius hopes, or is it a Tower of Babel? We find out in a stunning climax.
Sister Harriet says, at one point, “I have a face that’s easy to read, like a bad novel.”
The Suspension Bridge is a good, even excellent novel which unfolds logically and leaves the reader thinking about human nature, the supernatural, and the social changes that began in the 1960’s. I remember those days.
About the reviewer: Ruth Latta, who lives in Ottawa, knows the Seaway city which inspired Bothonville. Her most recent historical novel is A Striking Woman. Her work-in-progress is about an early modernist Canadian woman artist.