Author(s): Anna Smaill

Novel | Aotearoa Fiction | Read our reviews! | 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards long lists

Bird Life, the second novel by Booker Prize-longlisted author Anna Smaill, is a lyrical and ambitious exploration of madness and what it is like to experience the world differently.

In Ueno Park, Toyko, as workers and tourists gather for lunch, the pollen blows, a fountain erupts, pigeons scatter, and two women meet, changing the course of one another’s lives. Dinah has come to Japan from New Zealand to teach English and grieve the death of her brother, Michael, a troubled genius who was able to channel his problems into music as a classical pianist — until he wasn’t. In the seemingly empty, eerie apartment block where Dinah has been housed, she sees Michael everywhere, even as she feels his absence sharply.

Yasuko is polished, precise, and keenly observant — of her students and colleagues at the language school, and of the natural world. When she was thirteen, animals began to speak to her, to tell her things she did not always want to hear. She has suppressed these powers for many years, but sometimes she allows them to resurface, to the dismay of her adult son, Jun. One day, she returns home, and Jun has gone. Even her special gifts cannot bring him back.

As these two women deal with their individual traumas, they form an unlikely friendship in which each will help the other to see a different possible world, as Smaill teases out the tension between our internal and external lives and asks what we lose by having to choose between them.

'Bird Life is an astonishing book about grief, beauty and survival… the writing enters your bloodstream like a strange and wonderful drug.' —Emily Perkins, author of Lioness and The Forrests

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STELLA'S REVIEW:
Dinah has arrived in Japan to teach English. Her apartment is dismal, her job mediocre, but here, in this foreign city far from her suburban New Zealand upbringing, she thinks she can escape and forget about her twin brother. Yet everywhere she looks he is there. Dinah is moving through the city streets on the edge of tipping into despair. This city is what she wants but it is unexpectedly strange. She is at odds with it. Sleeping outside in the grim park outside her building, suspecting she is the only person living in the apartment complex (she never sees anyone) and wary of an overly aggressive crow. Is what she senses real? How far is she removed from herself when she is not playing the role of the foreign language teacher? Can she thrive here or will she be subsumed by her grief? Yasuko, a teacher at the same school, is polished and precise. From her elegant wardrobe to her observant eye, she is an enigma to her colleagues. They are wary but captivated by her charm and daring, while she holds herself separate and aloof. For this world is of little importance to her. She hides a secret self. One which she represses for her adult son Jun. When her son disappears Yasuko begins to unravel. She has powers within her that connect her to another world, a natural world. This supernatural world seems drawn to Yasuko, as much as she is drawn to it, and the carefully manicured roles she plays as teacher and parent are tentative. The animals in her past and present are increasingly close, although it is to the strange young foreigner she leans. She is convinced that the girl can help her reconnect with Jun. This unexpected relationship will take them both on a journey. For Yasuko, she is driven on by a desire to be released from her burdens towards a place where the voices can fly free. For Dinah, in the hope she will come home to herself, she will follow, as she has always done, without understanding the peril or the pleasure. Bird Life examines the forces that allow us to slip from one world to another, the relationship between the internal and external, and the tentative membrane that exists between genius and madness. As with Anna Smaill’s acclaimed previous novel, The Chimes, the writing is taut and evocative with subtle symbolism and a rhythmic beauty. The magical realism hints at Murakami and Allende, while the quotidian observations keep the novel in the here and now, creating a satisfying fracture in this absorbing story.