Birdcage Walk

by Helen Dunmore

Overview

Revolutionary turmoil in France threatens to cross the English border—and tear apart an increasingly tense marriage—in this “brilliant” gothic thriller (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

It is 1792, and Europe is seized by political unrest. In England, Lizzie Fawkes has grown up among Radicals who’ve followed the French Revolution with eager optimism. But Lizzie has recently married John Diner Tredevant, a developer who is heavily invested in Bristol’s housing boom, and he has everything to lose from social upheaval and the prospect of war. As the strain of financial setbacks and the secrets of his past converge upon him, his grip on what he considers his rightful property—including Lizzie—only grows tighter…From an Orange Prize winner and Whitbread Award finalist, this is a novel with a “charged radiance” (The New York Times) that explores romanticism and disillusionment, terror and love, and the dangerous lines between them.

“Dunmore knows how to let a narrative move like an arrow in flight…A man rows from Bristol to a glade where he has left his dead wife overnight. He must bury her fast, where no one will find her. From the start, Birdcage Walk has the command of a thriller as we keep company with John Diner Tredevant, an 18th-century property developer building a magnificent terrace in Clifton, high above the Avon Gorge. Lizzie, his second wife, does not know the details of what happened to his first. Nor do we know as much as we might suppose…The novel’s cast is marvelous and vivid.”—The Guardian

“Explores the impact of the French Revolution on 1790s England within the context of a gothic romance set in Bristol…[a] magnificently complex villain.”—Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802189226
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/26/2020
Series:	Books That Changed the World
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	943,512
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Helen Dunmore is the author of fourteen novels. Her first, Zennor in Darkness, won the McKitterick Prize. Her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize, now the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her bestselling novel The Siege was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Orange Prize.

Read an Excerpt

It was past nine o’clock now and he was still absent. Sarah and Philo had gone to their attic, while I sat by the fire, in a good light, with my work. I was making a shirt for him. He didn’t like to see me sewing when we were together—I should send the work out, he said—but he would change his mind when he put on the shirt. The linen was fine and I had measured him exactly. There were gussets under the arms so that he could stretch and move freely, as he had to. I sewed well and quickly, and my eyes were strong. I intended to make him half a dozen shirts, with his initials embroidered into the hems. He would pay four times as much for shirts of this quality from a tailor. We ought to have saved money, and lived in rooms.

I knew that Diner had sunk a great deal of money in the building of the terrace. The whole of his capital, I suspected, and he had borrowed many times more. The profit, he said, would come once all the houses were sold. The two large houses at each end of the terrace would have elegant columns and fine detailing in the stonework. The architect, Mr Fellingbourne, had designed the terrace so that these end houses would be more than twice the width of ours. They would not only be splendid, but they would have all the latest conveniences. A cold plunge bath was to be installed in the basement of each of the end houses, to attract the wealthiest and most discerning purchasers. But first, there must be foundations.

Editorial Reviews

We are often warned against allowing considerations of an author's personal circumstances to influence our view of his or her work, but it is impossible to read Helen Dunmore's Birdcage Walk without dwelling on the unhappy fact that she died in March 2017, less than three months after the novel's publication in the UK. What is more, Dunmore brings her death into the picture herself, offering a gloss to the book by including an afterword in which she says that, while she was not consciously aware that she was dying as she wrote this, the last of her fifteen novels, she nonetheless believes that somewhere in her creative self she did know. "The question of what is left behind by a life haunts the novel," she tells us. And it is through the book's several created individuals that she expresses her melancholy fascination with the way most human beings, despite productive, busy lives of consequence and influence in their own time, simply vanish from history.

Birdcage Walk is, in fact, marked by death and loss throughout — beginning with a brief note on Bristol's late- eighteenth-century building boom, which collapsed when war broke out between England and France in 1793. It left unfinished hundreds of houses meant to constitute grand terraces on the slopes of Clifton, overlooking the river Avon, creating "a roofless spectacle of ruin" that lasted years. Dunmore moves then to our own day, to a lonely man strolling with his dog through an overgrown cemetery; he comes across a grave marker, raised on July 14, 1793, commemorating Julia Elizabeth Fawkes, its inscription reading in part, "Her Words Remain Our Inheritance."

Never having heard of this woman, our man's interest is piqued, and further research reveals that she was a politically engaged writer married to one of Bristol's almost forgotten, highly prolific, radical pamphleteers — and that not one word of her own writing has survived. Aside from her gravestone, the only relicts are two scraps of a letter mentioning her, written after her death. The letter, written in a state of high emotion during the harrowing days of the French Revolution, is by an unknown person. Sadness washes over the lonely dog walker: "It was all dead and gone, and no one left to know what any of it had meant."

On that bleak note, we enter the eighteenth century itself. It is June 1789, and an unknown man — whom, alas, we shall come to know only too well — is digging a grave deep in the woods for the wife he has killed. Make that his first wife — for some three years later we find him, John Diner Tredevant, married to Julia Elizabeth Fawkes's daughter, Lizzie. He is a developer and builder, deep in debt, trying to pay his workmen to finish the terrace of houses in Clifton by the Avon Gorge that will, he believes, make his fortune. Lizzie, swept up in sexual passion, married him against the advice of her mother, and she is beginning to see what a mistake this was. Diner, as he insists on being called, is moody, volatile, oppressively controlling, and pathologically jealous. He questions his wife's every move, does not like her to have friends over or to leave the house, and, it emerges, sometimes follows her when she does go out. Most particularly he resents Lizzie's mother and her second husband, Augustus Gleeson, the two of them outspoken supporters of the revolution in France.

Julia and Augustus bear a strong resemblance to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin in their manner, interests, and work (Julia "working so hard she hardly had time to eat or speak," and Gleeson writing away, "buzzing like a fly at a window through which he would never escape"). The similarity is further brought home in that Julia dies in childbed, from puerperal fever — horrifically described — as did Wollstonecraft, though in this case an infant son, named Thomas after Tom Paine, survives, rather than the future Mary Shelley. We are reminded that while Wollstonecraft and Godwin are famous, they were only two among the many men and women beavering away promoting radical causes — for the rights of women and of workers, for freedom of speech and assembly — during this time, writers and speakers who made a difference but whose names are now lost to history.

Augustus, cerebral and scribbling, is not much given to childcare. Thus Lizzie, with the willing help of her little maid, Philo, takes over the care of the motherless child, her half brother. This is a cause of further resentment and outbursts of temper on the part of Diner, who claims that the child will wear his wife out, squandering the attention she properly owes him, her husband: "I was careful not to inflame Diner's suspicions by signs of tenderness for the baby," she tells us. "Instead, I cleared away the feeding things, rattles and cradle as evening came on, and gave Thomas back to Philo as soon as I heard the door. I did not speak of the baby to Diner unless he asked. You would rarely have guessed, from our conversation, that Thomas was in the house." Thee atmosphere in the house becomes increasingly dreadful, the women on pins and needles, creeping around trying not to arouse Diner's ire. Dunmore is brilliant in evoking an atmosphere of domestic tyranny, the fear, the uncertainty, the impotence of the victims. It is exceedingly painful, all the more so as Lizzie has absorbed her mother's views on the rights of women and yet must knuckle under to this monstrous bully for the sake of the child.

And, of course, Diner is no ordinary bully. He is also a murderer. Bit by bit Lizzie begins to detect something off about his explanation of what had happened to his first wife, Lucie, a Frenchwoman who, he had told her, returned to France and died there. In an ingenious maneuver that increases the nigh-unbearable tension, Dunmore presents Lizzie with evidence that Diner murdered the woman, but the clue comes in a manner that some readers will be able to understand, while Lizzie cannot. I will say no more about that unraveling, except to say that it's real nail- biter.

The novel, which is animated by a current of gothic horror, depicts the social ferment, the ideological passion, and, ultimately, the smashed visions of the late eighteenth century; it is rich in details of material life — and death; and it powerfully conveys the emotional urgency of its characters. We feel that the lives of these fictional beings are just as real as those of actual people whose ideas and exertions contributed to the tenor of those times, lives that are lost to us now in the murk of the past. We feel, too, Dunmore's deepened awareness of this and believe she did indeed have an intimation at some level that she, at least in body and mind, would soon be part of the past. Her finest books, among them The Siege, her previous one, Exposure, and this one will, I hope, keep both her memory and those of her characters alive for as long as people read novels.

Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963.

Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers

The Barnes & Noble Review

…Birdcage Walk defies and includes a number of genres; it steadfastly refuses to be one thing. And why should it? Why narrow the scope of what a novel can do? The plot meanders, surprises. The characters are thoughtful, complex and irritating; sometimes they just talk about ideas. Helen Dunmore…died in June of cancer. Increasingly ill as she worked on this book, she observes in its afterword that "under such a growing shadow," the novel "cannot help being full of a sharper light, rather as a landscape becomes brilliantly distinct in the last sunlight before a storm." That sharp light illuminates the canvas of Birdcage Walk and gives it a charged radiance. It has a tenuous, momentary feel, as if one were reading a Turner painting. The storm will blot it out.

The New York Times Book Review - Valerie Martin

★ 09/11/2017
This brilliant novel from the late Dunmore addresses the very issues with which all authors must grapple: What does one leave behind as a writer? What is the mark writers leave upon time? The layered story begins with a man coming across the 18th-century headstone of Julia Elizabeth Fawkes, inscribed, “Her Words Remain Our Inheritance.” But no record of her writing survives. Dunmore then leads the reader back 200 years to the cover-up of a murder, and then to Lizzy Fawkes Tredevant—daughter of the aforementioned Julia, raised among radicals in the English city of Bristol during the tumultuous period of the French Revolution. The willful Lizzy has married John Diner Tredevant, an ambitious builder with a dark past, who is hostile to the new political ideas making their way to England from Paris, ideas he believes may destroy his business prospects. He also resents Lizzy’s susceptibility to the influence of her mother and Julia’s entourage of English radicals. Lizzy and her mother are very close; when tragedy visits Julia’s household, Lizzy is left with an enormous responsibility. As the revolution in France comes to its frenzied zenith, Tredevant’s creditors balk, and his project for a terrace of houses in Bristol collapses. As her husband’s debts overwhelm them, Lizzy’s very life is threatened and John unravels into desperation. Dunmore has left readers with memorable, fascinating characters, both historical and fictional, “whose struggles and passions have been hidden from history.... But even so, did they not shape the future?” Agent: Caradoc King, United Agents. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Exposure

“Much like a slick, shape-shifting spook, Exposure is many things at once—an espionage thriller, a forbidden-love story, an immigrant’s tale—and it assumes these varied identities with confidence . . . a novel you won’t be able to shake.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Dunmore has always been fantastic on the complexity of people’s motivations and the secret reasons they act as they do. This book is no exception . . . This may be an unconventional thriller, but it’s still a page turner for that . . . as much a surprising love story as it is a tale of spies.” —New York Times Book Review

“Dunmore's strategy, placing a triangle of past and present loves within a spy novel, yields an unexpected dividend...viscerally exciting.”—New Yorker

“There are resemblances to Virginia Woolf not only in the terrific prose...a luminous story of courage and forgiveness.”—Arts Fuse

“A spy novel but one that has been quietly and ingeniously deepened well beyond the ambitions of genre . . . one of those books that you read with your heart in your mouth, your mind fully engaged, and with a sense of desolation as you note the dwindling number of pages left before it comes to an end.” —Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher

★ 08/01/2017
Although she does not subscribe to her mother's radical politics, Lizzie Fawkes Tredevant, daughter of a feminist pamphleteer and accustomed to changing lodgings in a hurry, is a free and independent spirit raised in a closely knit all-female household in 1792 England. Her passion for Diner Tredevant, the brilliant Bristol developer and builder, leads to a marriage that has her comparing his practical skills with the revolutionary rhetoric of her mother's circle, a rhetoric that has dangerous and unforeseen consequences as the Reign of Terror emerges from the populist rebellion of the French Revolution, and the fight for the civil rights of all turns into a brutal bloodbath. As Paris descends into madness, Lizzie discovers the darker side of her husband's obsessive love in a chilling tale of murder and politics. VERDICT After Exposure, Orange Prize winner Dunmore's final novel (the author died in June) is a gripping psychological mystery set in a compellingly portrayed period of exhilaration and unrest. [See Prepub Alert, 5/15/17.]—Cynthia Johnson, formerly with Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, MA

Library Journal

2017-07-04
Published posthumously, the final novel from prolific and genre-hopping Dunmore (Exposure, 2016, etc.) explores the impact of the French Revolution on 1790s England within the context of a gothic romance set in Bristol, where the author herself lived and wrote.Newly married 22-year-old Lizzie narrates the evolution of her marriage to builder John Diner Tredevant, a relationship both passionate and troubled. While Diner is a businessman, Lizzie was raised by her widowed Mammie, who writes radical political treatises promoting human rights and whose second husband counts Tom Paine as a friend. Lizzie married in defiance of Mammie, who voiced reservations about Lizzie's marriage to 36-year-old Diner because he was a widower as well as a businessman. As the novel opens, Lizzie, deeply in love, fears she is living in the shadow of Diner's first wife, Lucy, who died while visiting her native France—echoes of Daphne du Maurier and Charlotte Brontë—but soon enough Diner's jealous possessiveness becomes a bigger concern, as do the Tredevants' finances. Diner is heavily invested in developing a terrace of grand houses overlooking the River Avon. While Bristol has been in a building boom, Diner's business ambitions falter in England's newly uncertain political climate when Louis XVI is dethroned, threatening the concept of monarchy but also introducing the specter of mob rule and the possibility of war between France and England. (Needless to say, Diner's and Mammie's views differ on the development.) When 39-year-old Mammie dies unexpectedly, Lizzie cajoles a reluctant Diner to let her care for her infant half brother, Thomas, in their home. Since Diner wants all Lizzie's attention for himself, tensions increase. Then there are her new suspicions about his cloudy past and her growing if unspoken attraction to a young poet. Yet Lizzie remains emotionally entwined with the magnificently complex villain Diner. Middling Dunmore, but middling Dunmore is still damn fine. Her death at 64 is a real loss.

Kirkus Reviews