The Charles Bridge

I forgot where the idea for this book came from, although I knew instantly that it would be set in Prague, a city that's fascinated me from an early age. I started with the idea of a failed revolution. My generation lived through a failed and rather fatuous revolution in the sixties so that was part of it, and also the sense that something missed happening in 1848 that then turned to the worst poison in the whole history of the the West. From that failure came communism, and political racism, especially the nationalistic antisemitism that led to the Holocaust, and to the ferocious ethnic nationalism that led in turn to the world wars of the twentieth century. A good deal the stuff that occupies our heads now had its debut in Prague around 1848. I was also interested in the lost world of aristocracy, which Americans pine for and hate at the same time, seeing in the aristocratic style a relief from the corrosive status anxiety of their lives, and so I wanted to write a sort of defense of that cast of mind, and I wanted to write about a revolutionary era and the maddening choices such eras present to their denizens, perhaps in memory of the dead sixties as well. I had, from who knows where, an image of the Charles Bridge in Prague by moonlight, and a boy, a little baron, about to commit suicide because of Romance, this when the idea of Romance was still bright and new, and how he was saved by a distinctly un-romantic courtesan, and what happened to him after this signal event. And on the other side of the story I tell what brought him to the bridge in the first place, a strange fairy-tale kind of life, with an ogre father and an unobtainable princess. Meanwhile, sixty years after the night on the bridge, revolution is brewing, and we also see the world through the eyes of a Revolutionary, who, though dedicated to bringing down the Aristocrat and his system, finds himself falling into a personal relationship with the now aged aristocrat.The aristocratic world was tiny in that era and so it's not far-fetched for our hero to meet the famous of his age, Goethe, Mozart and Casanova, for example, and he does. There's plenty of romance, both sacred and profane, there in the Romantic era, plus dueling, billiards, cavalry charges, desperate escapes, sieges, and all the other stuff you expect in a historical novel.