Kate Grenville employs a line from Leonardo da Vinci as the epigraph to her gentle, meandering version of this story: ‘An arch is two weaknesses which together make a strength’...Grenville gradually builds just such a structure between her two possible lovers, who are not so much weak as they are wearied by life's indignities and assault … The novel has a heft that is belied by its lighter and more ironic moments. Grenville does her characters the honor of taking their pain seriously and is gracious enough to allow them their hard-earned pleasure. Her ability to move between these elements gives her novel a beautiful balance, and her readers a lasting faith in the necessity of bridges of all kinds.
The simple plot of this novel—a woman and a man have conflicting goals, hers to preserve history by establishing a museum, his to institute progress by replacing a picturesque old bridge with a new concrete one—functions merely as a dummy on which the Australian novelist Kate Grenville drapes a gorgeous and intricate study of three characters … It's an amusing and moving story of unlikely love, but one could read it just to marvel at Grenville's astounding writing … Her sentences—deceptively casual in their diction and rhythm—peg every moment with exquisite and surprising aptness.
...slight in scope and execution, but mined throughout with little pockets of danger and depth … From these two reticent characters, besieged by two lifetimes of regret, doubt and dismay, Grenville manufactures an extraordinary comedy of manners, made all the more powerful by her own reticence as a writer. Her key atmosphere, a little like that of Alan Bennett, is one of awkwardness … The novel proceeds by stealth, its multiple gambits never developed into full-blown plot machinations. Slowly, things happen, characters both major and minor shift into position and secrets are revealed, but there is a marked lack of brashness and authorial business.
There’s a smile—if not an outright belly laugh—on every page of this delicious comic novel … Grenville moves among their separate (and conjoined) stories with easy skill. The unfailingly delightful incidents dramatize the demolition of each major character’s ‘idea of perfection’ … All—including the stray dog that attaches itself to Harley—eventually discover the considerable pleasures of human (and animal) imperfection.
