Queer Revolution, Zombie Uprisings, and the problem with M. R. Carey’s The Boy on the Bridge
I was excited to read M. R. Carey’s The Boy on the Bridge; I requested it months in advance from the library where I work, and when I finally received it, I set aside everything else I was reading and flew through it in two days, overjoyed to be back in the world of The Girl with All the Gifts — one of my favorite books from the past few years. However, at the end of those two days, I closed the book disappointed.
Turns out I wasn’t the only one.
A quick recap for those who haven’t read it: The Girl with All the Gifts is a story about a dystopian future in which England (and presumably the rest of the world) is ravaged by zombie-like humans called “hungries,” who have been infected and controlled by a parasitic fungus called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. The main character, Melanie, is one of a number of children infected to the hungry fungus who, unlike the normal adult hungries, displays normal cognitive capabilities. These hungry children are studied in the hopes of finding a cure for the plague to save humanity, but the story twists in on itself from there as hungries attack the remote science base and Melanie, her teacher Helen Justineau, the lead scientist Dr. Caroline Caldwell, and several military guards escape and try to find their way back to Beacon. The Boy on the Bridge is a pseudo-prequel telling the story of the science/military team of the mobile lab Rosalind Franklin, who discover a pack of the hungry children as they drive around the British countryside collecting samples and getting into arguments with one another. There’s more to both books, but that’s the gist.
The primary argument in Tasha Robinson’s excellent review of The Boy on the Bridge is that it suffers from what she calls “a prequel problem”: “Boy On The Bridge suffers by comparison with its predecessor, not just because it has so few secrets to unfurl, but because its character dynamic is so strikingly similar to the one in Girl With All The Gifts.” Robinson is right, in this, and right in the assertion that The Boy on the Bridge suffers from a problem of irrelevance, as the questions the characters are trying to answer have been answered already, the ethical arguments they have just a rehashing of those with which readers are familiar from reading Gifts. There is a disappointing anticlimax to the knowledge that everything the crew of the Rosalind Franklin is discovering has been or will be discovered by the characters of Gifts after the Rosie’s demise, and still none of it will make any difference to the story at large. Perhaps a case could be made for this irrelevance working narratively as part of a bleak tale of hopelessness and futility at the end of the world; this is not that book.
But when I set down The Boy on the Bridge after turning the final page and let out a discontented sigh, it wasn’t the “prequel problem” that disturbed me. What left me with a sour taste in my mouth was a problem of a more revisionary nature.
What I found disappointing, and ultimately troubling, about the conclusion of Carey’s sequel, was not the contents of the majority of the book, but the ending — or, more specifically, the epilogue. The ending-proper of the novel is not dissimilar in scope or tragedy to the ending of the original: an infected but lucid Samrina Khan bites one of the junkers working in tandem with the military muster of Beacon, setting off a chain reaction that results in the infection or death of nearly every character not already dead; Stephen Greaves presents himself and Samrina’s hungry newborn baby to the horde of hungry children, providing for the child a safe place to live among his own kind and sacrificing his own life to keep the secret that a cure could be created from the cerebro-spinal fluid of the hungry children; a small handful of surviving characters from the crew of the Rosalind Franklin escape in a helicopter to scrape together a meager existence in the hopefully safe high altitude of the Scottish mountain Ben Macdhui.
And then Carey provides us with an epilogue that is not only unwarranted, but completely reverses the ending of his original novel.
The Ben Macdhui encampment, still overseen by the survivors of the novel’s main text 20 years later, is surviving, but just barely; the supposed last vestige of human civilization in a world overtaken by cordyceps, it is a small civilization destined to die out before long. In the epilogue, the encampment is approached by a group of now-adult hungry children, led by Gifts protagonist Melanie. Melanie surprises Colonel Carlisle and the others by telling them that they are not here to eat them, but instead to help. In addition to bringing an elderly Helen Justineau to stay with the humans, Melanie offers the encampment food, and offers to keep them fed and safe for years to come. She offers not only to collect fruits and proteins, to have her people cultivate grains for the humans to eat even though the hungries do not eat grains themselves. In order to save the humans from becoming “legends,” lost to time, Melanie offers her people’s labor in service of keeping the doomed humans alive, and in exploring the world for more like them.
With absolutely no on-paper character arc to get there, the very same girl who set the world ablaze to protect those like her from the horror and destruction of a terrified and reckless humanity now offers herself up in service of those self-same humans.
Okay. What?
The Girl with all the Gifts ended spectacularly. Melanie sets ablaze a terrifying wall of matured Ophiocordyceps fungus, providing the environmental trigger necessary to make the spores airborne, allowing it to spread to virtually everyone in the world, no longer necessitating the transmission of the hungry plague via bodily fluids. And then Helen Justineau, the sole authority figure in the novel who always saw Melanie as a person and not as just a monster or a test subject, begins to teach the hungry children Melanie has gathered, precipitating the rise of a new kind of civilization, freed from the vestiges of the civilization that came beforehand.
She explains to Parks, moments before cordyceps takes over his higher brain functions, her vision for the future, one in which the destruction of the people of Beacon and the junkers may die but life goes on. She says: “This way is better . . . the [hungry] children will grow up, and they won’t be the old kind of people . . . They’ll be different. Like me . . . They’ll be the next people. The ones who make everything okay again.”
It’s a moment of utter revolution: out with the old, in with the new. Melanie’s new world, the one she imagines of hungry children like her, is a world that rejects the old order of things. Quite literally, with the deaths of Dr. Caroline Caldwell and Sergeant Eddie Parks — two characters who are defined by and serve as literal representations of scientific experimentation and military might — Melanie ushers in a new era free from the kinds of institutions that marginalized her and her people, who destroyed her and her own kind in order to save themselves.
Or, more simply and poetically put in the film version of the text, Parks sees the air filled with cordyceps spores, and says, “It’s over. It’s all over,” and, quite simply, Melanie looks him in the eye and answers, “It’s not over. It’s just not yours anymore.”
It’s the kind of sentence I yearn to be given the opportunity to say. The monster, the zombie, looks at a ruined humanity and says, no, you fucked this up, and now it’s my turn to try again. It is the rhetoric of righteous revolution. Melanie takes the world from the people who locked her up, dehumanized her, shackled her, abused her, experimented on her and the kids like her. She takes the world from them, and from the oppressive institutions they represent.
Parks’ place in the allegorical scheme of things is clear, and cemented two-fold by the existence of Colonel Isaac Carlisle in Bridge, who followed orders to burn huge swathes of English land filled with innocent people to the ground in a fruitless effort to find a more efficient way to wipe out the hungries, and lives in a complicated sort of regret and resignation with the compulsions of following a military chain of command against his better judgement. Carey makes no effort to disguise an understanding of the not-so-complicated destruction of military force, of martial chains of command, of following orders when they challenge your moral compass. The military forces of both Gifts and Bridge are clearly corrupt, but just as clearly not out of the ordinary in the corruption that drives them; both groups of soldiers are equally ineffectual, causing needless, heedless destruction fare more often than solving problems or keeping anyone safe. But the military is not the only institution Carey tackles with a critical eye and deems worthy of critique.
Dr. Caroline Caldwell, though an easily despicable villain of a character in the novel, represents a more subtle institution. After all, science is good, isn’t it? Science is progress. Science is real, actual fact, remaining ostensibly unbiased thanks to the all-seeing eye of the scientific method and peer-reviewed journals. Or, at least, that’s what we’re taught.
Caldwell’s science is not a science of progress; it is the kind of science that calls itself apolitical and sterilizes the murder of children in the name of an allegedly greater good. It is the kind of science that locks children in jail cells and treats them as animals while refusing to confront its own internal and unavoidable biases. In real historical analogue, it is the science of doctors like J. Marion Sims, abusing the bodies of enslaved African women in the name of modern gynecology; of doctors like Chester M. Southam injecting cancer cells into the skin of non-consenting prisoners; of compulsory punitive or eugenic sterilization; of so-called “corrective” surgeries on the atypical genitals of intersex infants. It is the science that Michel Foucault reminds us is inextricably linked to a discursive power/knowledge system, a science that creates subject positions, the science that invented the homosexual in order to oppress it, that creates and propagates discourses that elevate its motivations and calls them objective truth. There is nothing inherently wrong with science, but war is not the only institution that claims lives. Science is no more immune to imperialistic impulse and selfish motivation than government or military or any other institution.
Caldwell’s violence in the name of progress forces the reader to examine how and why we allow ourselves to prioritize one kind of life over another, how our internal biases orient our moral compass when it comes to causing and preventing suffering. As Melanie asks Caldwell in the film, “Why should it be us who die for you?”
Melanie sets this science ablaze to reshape the world in her own image, an image entirely free from the institutions that oppressed her and those like her, from the remnants of a society that the world deemed was beyond salvation.
Carey’s original novel is a treasure trove of ethical dilemmas, examining the morality of scientific experimentation, the rights of the hungry children as not-human but not-quite-monster, the questionable prioritization of human life over a kind of life that is not yet understood. Monster theory, for years, has told us that where there is a monster, in fiction, there is a mirror of someone or something marginalized. After all, that’s what monsters are: warnings of what lies beyond the border of what is socially acceptable, reminders of the consequences of breaking the rules. Monsters have always been signposts for what their societies fear the most: the racial Other, the independent woman, the transgressive queer. Carey’s monsters, the hungry children like Melanie, are no different; they are a sympathetic allegory for any community oppressed or marginalized by society and by its institutions.
When, at the end of Gifts, Melanie burns down the formerly prevailing social order and claims the world for herself and her kind, it is a revolution. It is a statement of protest in a world so broken that the only way to improve society is to start over from scratch.
But at the ending of Bridge, the now-matured hungry children set out to help the remaining humans from Beacon, now living in the Scottish mountains, offering their time and labor to produce and procure food, and to set off across the globe in search of any other survivors. Rather than providing us with an insight into what the world has become, in the hands of the hungry children and free of the civilization that tried to eradicate them, Bridge returns the world, in its way, to the remnants of that civilization.
Perhaps Carey is trying to tell us that even post-revolution, revisiting our history is unavoidable; perhaps, his message in the epilogue is that there are things worth saving even after society has been reinvented. But as both a scholar of monster literature and a queer person, I am dissatisfied with a conclusion in which the monsters who finally escaped their own alterity in order to seize control and create a civilization for themselves turn back to the civilization that marginalized them and serve the remnants of that civilization. That message, to me, is more anticlimactic than a plotline in which the major discovery is the same exact major discovery of the novel that preceded it.
Sure, Melanie was always empathetic. Sure, she was always fascinated by myths and legends. And perhaps if The Boy on the Bridge had been another novel about Melanie, charting her journey to that decision, I might understand it. But it wasn’t. And I don’t.
Post-apocalyptic stories, at their best, are about how we can re-build for the better, about starting over wholecloth in the absence of the institutions that destroyed us. Monster stories in which the monster prevails and is ultimately seen as more sympathetic than the humans who ostracized it are a rare moment of triumph for marginalized peoples who have always seen themselves coded as the monster of a story. The Girl with All the Gifts gave me that, and will forever be among my favorite zombie stories for it. But only if I pretend that I never read The Boy on the Bridge.
