The Boy On The Bridge

The Gifted
Generation

The Boy On
The Bridge
by M. R. Carey
Orbit Publishing
ISBN: 9780356503561

Warning: Some very mild spoilers.

The Boy On The Bridge is M. R. Carey’s prequel novel to the original novel and film The Girl With All The Gifts (my review of the film is here and the book review is here), which he wrote simultaneously, giving slightly different versions of the same story to different media as he went along. Now, I absolutely loved both the movie and novel versions of that one but I have to say, I expected a prequel to a story which had a very definite and somewhat bleak ending... at least for the human survivors of the post-apocalyptic world depicted... to be somewhat labouring the point as it surely could have nothing new to say. But, actually, I was wrong, it’s not all doom and gloom in this prequel and, well, let me just say that the brief epilogue to the book, set 20 years after the events depicted in this novel, actually acts as an epilogue to the first novel as well... or as a sequel, actually.

So this story is about the crew of the fortified truck/land raider style military vehicle which went out in the world to find a cure but which disappeared long before the action in the first novel/film took place. The vehicle is called the Rosalind Frank, known more affectionately as Rosie, which houses a small team of scientists and military personnel, collecting biological samples from the hungries (the name for the zombies in Carey’s world) in order to try and find some kind of helpful cure or breakthrough against the highly contagious disease which has destroyed the majority of the population... the ‘still human population’... of the planet. You may or may not remember that the discarded carcass of the Rosie was found by a bunch of survivors in The Girl With All The Gifts and was made much use of, by them, for a while.

This is the story of one of the scientists, Greaves, a boy genius who has a kind of high level Aspergers or something similar, who is also the inventor of the blocker/inhibitor that we were introduced to in the first book/film that humans smear on to hide their scent from the hungries. He’s mostly hated, or at least looked on with much suspicion, by most of the others apart from one scientist, Dr. Khan, who kinda rescued him as a young boy. However, Khan is pregnant, as it turns out and really shouldn’t be on this mission in this state... especially after something happens around halfway through the book which puts both her fate and that of the baby’s in a much more questionable state, in terms of how they will be accepted by the rest of the crew.

This novel also builds on the idea of the Junkers (which were in the first novel but not in the movie version) and, very importantly, the tribe of half hungries/half human children who the ‘special’ pupil Melanie discovers in The Girl With All The Gifts... depicted here a few years before she meets up with them.

And, it’s a very entertaining and certainly gripping novel. Somewhat, it has to be said, because the author has followed a similar formula to the first one. A ‘special’ kid (in this case human) and an adult who sympathises and has a relationship of sorts with him. And then the world is seen through the eyes of Greaves for a lot of it but it’s also much more of an ensemble piece in terms of other characters also having a lot to say and do... Carey limits himself to around five or six characters with which we share the odyssey of the book.

And, yeah, this is a short review for sure but, mainly because it’s a brilliant novel and I had no complaints at all. I do want to say though that, if you’re familiar with the first one in either of its forms, then this tale isn’t just a case of filling in the gaps... it does advance things to the point where a kind of hope can be found out of the ashes of both what happens here and at the ending of the original tale. Also, without giving too much away, the epilogue of the book is where you will find out, definitively, what just became of Melanie and Miss Justineau from the first book. Things tie in a lot nicer than you might be expecting and... well, I’d love to read a third book at some point but, like the first story, I’d be hard pressed to figure out where the author could possibly go from here. But, yeah, he did pretty great with The Boy On The Bridge so, perhaps that’s not just wishful thinking on my part. So... a hugely entertaining and very suspenseful novel which more than lives up to the original. My one warning to potential readers, though, would be to read The Girl With All The Gifts before you start on this one... otherwise that epilogue is going to make no sense and will give away spoilers for the first novel (and film). So, yeah, give it a go.