Unlock Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, editor-in-chief of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Gavin Francis begins his new book with “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” his favorite story as a little boy growing up in Scotland. In this Norwegian folk tale, three goats want to cross a bridge to reach a field of sweet grass, but a troll controls the span, threatening to eat the first and smallest goat. Goat One persuades the troll to wait for Goat Two, a bigger and tastier meal; Eventually, Goat Three, Big Goat, throws the troll off the bridge so that peace and order can be restored.

“The bridge in history is a barrier, but it is also a kind of test,” Francis writes. In the end, “the bridge regains its glorious function: connection rather than division”. Yet in the chapters that follow, he questions whether the function and meaning of bridges can ever be expressed in such a simple and optimistic way.

Francis is a doctor and mathematician; He currently works in Scottish community clinics as a GP, but has written about his travels in Arctic Europe and Antarctica, published a gripping account of life as a GP during the Covid pandemic and produced a monograph on the 17. thinker of the century Thomas Browne.

His 2020 book Island dreams was subtitled “Mapping an Obsession” and The bridge between worlds is also the fruit of a deep passion. From those three goats and the evil troll to his treasured bridge book Ladybird, his fascination with spans is enduring. He uses an epigraph from the Koran: “The world is a bridge; pass over it, but don’t build houses on it. These words convey the meaning of his book, which is at once a story of history, a travelogue and a meditation on culture and politics.

Bridges are not an absolute good. The ease of connection can bring more difficulties than it solves.

It is structured chronologically and geographically. Five sections spanning from the 1980s to the 2020s trace the direction of Francis’ life as he becomes a doctor and travels the world either of his own volition or – later – because he is invited to medical conferences. In each section, he categorizes the bridges he encounters based on what he attributes to them expressing.

The Victoria Falls Bridge – a steel arch bridge over the Zambezi River that was the vision of Cecil Rhodes – is a “bridge of division”, with the relentless push of European colonizers taking a heavy toll on the countries it connects, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The ancient AnJi stone arch bridge in Xiaohe, China, is a “bridge of peace” because, in Francis’ eyes, it remains a symbol of the kind of serene political consolidation that such structures can achieve. The Brooklyn Bridge is a “bridge of poetry” because of its association with Hart Crane, Joseph Stella and other artists who sang of its steel and stone. And so on.

The danger of this conceit is that it covers both too much and not enough ground. Despite the vigor of his prose, his personal story can read like a sketched travelogue as he moves from one country to another.

And for someone who loves bridges as much as Francis, it’s a shame that he too often omits the names of their builders. He cites the famous architect Le Corbusier on the grace of the George Washington Bridge which spans the Hudson River in New York, but forgets to mention Othmar Ammann, who deserves greater fame. He admires Singapore’s historic Cavenagh Bridge, opened in 1869 and which still stands in this bustling city: you won’t learn that it was the work of John Turnbull Thomson, a Northumberland-born engineer. It would be strange to praise the “Mona Lisa” and never say who painted it.

Francis is right to recognize that bridges are not simple manifestations of harmony and union. In Bosnia, Australia, Bhutan, he realizes that beauty can hide something darker; progress is never progress for all. He comes to “the conviction that bridges are not an absolute good. Ease of connection can bring more challenges to a community than it solves.

There is a dispute over who will benefit from the new Pelješac bridge over the Neretva Canal; the glorious Sydney Harbor Bridge evokes the attempted extermination of a continent’s indigenous population; a 17th-century wooden bridge in Bhutan expresses “a balance between Chinese and Indian ambitions” for the region.

Bridges have the ability “to change the entire meaning of a place,” he writes. The question remains who decides what that meaning is or can be. Despite its flaws, there is elegance in Francis’ book – not least in his vision that his chosen profession can itself be a bridge, and that the care of one human being for another is “borderless”. We build a bridge when we simply take another’s hand.

The Bridge Between Worlds: A Brief History of Connection by Gavin Francis, Canongate £20, 288 pages

Join our online reading group on Facebook at FT Book Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and art wherever you listen