20197826 - ENGL3065 - Contemporary Fiction

ASSESSMENT 1 – CRITICAL COMMENTARY

Word count: 1496

In ‘Troll Bridge’, Neil Gaiman employs the paratext of the fairy tale “The Three Billy Goats

Gruff” to tell a story of change; in place of three goats, there is a man called Jack who

meets the troll at three distinct stages of his life. On one level, the story is about a boy

going from childhood to pubescence into middle age, traversing the Blakeian planes of

innocence over to experience as he ages. On another - though not entirely distinct - level,

‘Troll Bridge’ reflects the changing face of Britain, as its provincial towns and villages are

effaced and overlooked in favour of the industrial capital. This passage serves as a prelude

to Jack’s final meeting with the troll, signals towards his midlife despair and ennui, and

reflects how the landscape has changed and aged as Jack has.

The passage begins with Jack finding out his wife is leaving him, and going on a cold

winter’s walk, ‘stunned and slightly numb’, where he soon realises he is on an old and

overgrown railway track.1 In his first two meetings with the troll, he is walking up the path,

but now he is ‘coming down it from the other direction’, symbolically returning to his youth. 2

At the beginning of the story, Jack tells us that his ‘earliest reliable memory’ is being on a

bridge over the railway tracks with his grandmother when the steam trains were still

running, immediately linking together the history of the railways and Jack’s own personal

history.3 Jack is now an adult and the area he lives in is populated by commuters to the

capital; as he walks, he sees cars ‘travelling to and from London’, suggesting that the city

has supplanted the countryside in British socio-geographic values.4 These cars don’t drive to

1
Neil Gaiman, 'Troll Bridge', in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story,
ed. by Philip Hensher (London: Penguin, 2018), p.114
2
ibid., p.115
3
ibid., p.107
4
ibid., p.114

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and from provincial towns in the way that the old railways ‘joined village to village’, further

representing a change and disconnect as British society becomes more isolated.5 Jack

experiences the same disconnect and isolation; his wife, Eleanora, has left him. This is

underlined in how he doesn’t directly say that he never loved her, but instead refracts this

sentiment through her words. He says ‘every word of [Eleanora’s letter] was true’ before he

reveals what those words were: ‘You really don’t love me. And you never did.’6 There is a

dissonance between Jack and his emotions just as there is dissonance within the British

landscape. In this passage, Gaiman highlights the juxtaposition between the pastoral and

the modern through Jack’s descriptions of the surrounding landscape. By the path Jack

walks along is a river ‘at right angles to the road’, a visual symbol of nature at odds with the

metropolitan.7 This river ‘meandered across the fields’, moving with a sense of naturalness

and implicit belonging, whereas the houses that have cropped up in the surrounding fields

are ‘new and small and square’, an artificial and unnatural presence.8

Like the railway, the bridge further carries symbolism for both Jack and the changing

landscape around him. Now he is an adult and has an ability to fully perceive and

understand his surroundings, the bridge is represented in a different way. On his first visit

to the troll, the bridge is made of ‘clean read brick’ with meadows on either side.9 In the

passage, there are graffiti on the bridge, painting a grim image compared to the verdant

arcadia Jack described as a child.10 One of these graffiti is ‘the omnipresent NF of the

National Front’; even though the story is set long after the National Front’s power reached

its peak in the early 1970s, its existence is still present.11 If Jack and Louise were listening

5
ibid., p.107
6
ibid., p.114
7
ibid., p.114
8
ibid., p.114
9
ibid., p.108
10
ibid., p.115
11
Richard C. Thurlow, Fascism in Britain (London: I. B. Tauris & Company, 1998), p.260

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to The Stranglers’ Rattus Norvegicus and early punk when they were fifteen, this would

place them in 1977, a time when the presence of the National Front was keenly felt. It is

significant, then, that the older and more experienced Jack only notices the National Front

graffiti now, when it likely would already have been there on his second visit to the troll. He

is no longer innocent to the darker side of the British national psyche, suggesting a cynicism

and apathy in him that gives context to his complete submission to the troll.

The bleak description in this passage of Jack’s surroundings also signals towards his

maturity and change in outlook, giving the passage the sense that his story is ending. As he

walks down the path on ‘hard frost’, Jack sees ‘skeletal black’ trees, with leaves that

‘crunched under [his] feet’.12 Here, the harsh, abrasive language used to describe what Jack

is seeing stands in stark contrast to the lush, sylvan scene described in Jack’s first

encounter with the troll. His innocence was reflected in this arcadian imagery; the forest

around the path seems a ‘fairy land’ and the path is a ‘golden-green corridor’.13

Furthermore, when he first met the troll it was ‘summer, hot and bright’, connoting a

happiness and hopefulness in 7-year-old Jack.14 The second meeting takes place on a warm

summer night; he is a little older and evidently no longer afraid of the dark, but ultimately

proves himself naïve in his dealings with Louise and the troll. In the passage, he now walks

under a ‘harsh grey winter sky’.15 The winter sky is a pathetic fallacy, signifying how Jack is

in the final season of his life - or at least what he knows as his life - before him and the troll

swap places, and the greyness of the scene lends a liminality and uncertainty to this final

act. In “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”, the final and eldest goat to cross the bridge defeats

the troll, but in ‘Troll Bridge’, Jack willingly acquiesces to the troll, giving him his life to eat.

12
Gaiman, 'Troll Bridge', p.114
13
ibid., p.108
14
ibid., p.108
15
ibid., p.114

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He isn’t the strongest one to cross the bridge, but in fact the weakest, ‘stupidly, silently’

crying as he faces the troll.16

A motif running through the story that exemplifies the connection between Jack and the

railways lines’ concurrent development is the clinker rock. In the passage, he finds the

presence of the clinker found on the side of the path ‘warm and reassuring’ in his pocket.17

Jack’s feeling warmed and reassured by the clinker suggests a nostalgic safety that he finds

in the memories of his youth and literally warmer times, as the other two troll-meetings

take place in summer. The connection between the clinker and Jack’s childhood is made

clear by the similarities in the language used by both 7-year-old Jack and adult Jack to

describe it: as a child these rocks were ‘melted things […] purple […] every colour of the

rainbow’ and as an adult it is ‘a melted lump of purplish stuff, with a strange rainbow sheen

to it’.18 This connection suggests that he still contains, somewhere within, the same capacity

for wonderment and awe that he had when he was young and innocent. The clinker rock

itself plays a significant role in bringing about the beginning of Jack’s departure from

innocence the first time he meets the troll. When he first finds the clinker, he assumes they

are ‘extremely valuable’, calling them ‘precious stones’ and ‘lava jewel rocks’; he doesn’t

know what they are so he assumes they are almost magical.19 Yet the troll quickly dismisses

the rocks as ‘discarded refuse of steam trains […] of no value to me’, and after this

revelation, where before he was translucent and Jack could see right through him, the troll

‘became more and more solid […] more real’, and ‘the world outside became flatter, began

to fade’.20 The magic has all but disappeared and Jack is disillusioned, a metaphor for his

16
ibid., p.115
17
ibid., p.114
18
ibid., p.108; P.114
19
ibid., p.110
20
ibid., p.110

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loss of innocence. Following this idea, it is evident Jack idealises his childhood, and

treasures his connection to it.

Ultimately, ‘Troll Bridge’ is a reflective meditation on the passage of time, in both personal

and political dimensions. Throughout the story, there is a nostalgia for an oft-idealised

period of British history that is now inaccessible; he shows how easy it is to make a fairy

tale of the past, to yearn for a greener, simpler, more connected Britain. The same is true

on a personal level: Jack romanticises his childhood and makes a fable of his youth as an

alternative to dealing with the realities of his current personal circumstances. In this

passage, Jack’s personal failings and past hopes are writ large, and he reflects on his

childhood for comfort. Yet it soon becomes apparent that it can’t always be possible to

consolidate past and present.

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Bibliography:

- Gaiman, Neil, 'Troll Bridge', in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short

Story, ed. by Philip Hensher (London: Penguin, 2018), pp.107-116

- Thurlow, Richard C., Fascism in Britain (London: I. B. Tauris & Company, 1998)