Birdcage Walk

A quiet novel, yet buzzing with life, Birdcage Walk is a landmine of a tale on the human experience. When I say 'quiet'—I mean it. Like humming. Like a whisper. Like a story being relayed secretly in a dark room. In fact, its slow nature made me afraid that it would dip into the realm of boring, but it never did. It moved along with increasing and surprising urgency. The narrator, Elizabeth, is not terribly young in age, but incredibly naïve in spirit and awareness. So, we almost have a bildungsroman here, as she grows and changes in small ways throughout the book. Her eyes open and she finds her voice all while being surrounded by a mystery she slowly comes to acknowledge. Despite its slower pace, I was pleased to find this story an incredibly engaging one with broad, expansive characters and fully realized settings. The atmosphere is tight, constrained, and claustrophobic, as written by Dunmore, pressing down on the reader as Lizzie stumbles her way through this astoundingly important time in her life. This is a deep and moving novel with the French Revolution and the events leading up to France declaring war on England as the backdrop. Despite that heavy time in history serving as the background, the focus remains on Lizzie throughout the book. However, Lizzie's mother, Julia, is the reason we dive into the story. The novel opens with a man and his dog discovering the grave marker for Julia Fawkes. This man learns that Julia was a pamphleteer in England during the time leading up to the French Revolution. All her work has been lost, and even we as the readers never discover more than a tiny snippet of her writing ability. This novel's author, Helen Dunmore died of cancer earlier this year, and I love that there's an afterword in her own voice about her experience writing this book. There's something very poignant about this author writing about another writer whose words have been lost. A beautifully and intimately written historical fiction novel with dashes of suspense, mystery, coming-of-age, and drama all rolled into one.

Poignant, ominous, and remarkable descriptive! Birdcage Walk takes us back to Bristol in the late 1790s when France was full of unrest, war was on the horizon, and the British people struggled with impoverishment, scarcity, impending disaster, and financial ruin. The prose is expressive and raw. The main characters include the maternal, independent, supportive Lizzie and the jealous, iron-fisted, ruined Tredevant. And the plot, although a little slow in the middle, is laced from start to finish with an underlying feeling of despair and a real, palpable bleakness as the ongoing drama, social strife, economic uncertainty, marital tension, and increasing violence unravels. I have to admit that even though Birdcage Walk is not my favourite novel by Dunmore, it is still a beautiful, haunting tale that highlights her talent of writing historical fiction that moves, informs, and leaves a lasting impression. The passing of Dunmore earlier this year is certainly a tremendous loss for the literary world and to quote from the inscription on the grave of her fictional character in this novel, “Her Words Remain Our Inheritance.”

I liked the book despite its leaving many questions unresolved. The book reminded me at times of lesser known books by Daphne du Maurier. The action takes place in England during the French revolution. Lizzie's mother Julia Fawkes is a radical. These radicals want to end the class system in England and they closely watched by the British authorities. From a distance, they watch the revolution in France. While Lizzie is attached to her mother, she marries John Diner Tredevant a property developer with big plans. He is at odds with Lizzie's mother and the radicals. I wished the novel had stopped here. The book raises interesting questions while not answering them. Who becomes a radical and why? The novel starts but telling us that Julia Fawkes while well known in her time has been forgotten. We never find out the answer of why she was forgotten. The daughter Lizzie while very fond of her mother seems to want a different kind of life from her mother and one that is more materialistic and in the mainstream of society. However, as the novel progresses the people become more stereotypically good or bad people. I wish the novel more stuck to the issue of radicals and how they relate to the community about them. While it was not a perfect book, it held me interest and I enjoyed it. I received a free copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.