The Birdwisher by Anna Joy Springer (A Review By Helen McClory)

108pgs/$10

I found this a difficult book to read, though it was short, and beautifully put together and in parts as light as souffle. ‘A murder mystery for very old young adults’, it describes itself within, and this proves to be an accurate way of summing things up.

The Birdwisher opens with a gruesome scene of ‘The Virgin’ – a young woman – in her bedroom, armed with a pair of scissors and a desire to rid herself of her hymen. Yes, in that way. Yes she is successful. Forgive me if I don’t quote anything from there. Even typing about it makes my blood pressure drop and my head buzz. It is not for the faint of head, as I am. But the reasons for why she is performing this act are worse than the act itself.

However, the narrative takes time to build up to the why. The novella’s subsequent chapters follow the adventures of a gumshoe pigeon, attempting work out the who-dunnit and the why-dunnit of the murder and mutilation of several birds. Walker Geon, pigeon detective, deliberate exile from his flock due to his refusal to fly, has been hired for the job by the lonely, teenaged Gwen – perhaps The Virgin of the opening, though the link is not at first made outright. In this section we see the YA aspect: there is a jauntiness to the pigeon’s narrative, with its parodic noir style, its use of alliteration, of exaggeration.

Ivy Hue [a hummingbird] was charming as hell, and if she had enemies, none of them bragged it. I’d once promised the beauty, in a moment of high spirits, to give her a shot at sleuthing when I needed a fast female. I thought I could use her now.

“Please penetrate my paradise, P.I. Pigeon! Such a succulent surprise!”

Ivy Hue had a way of talking that made a guy feel funny. She dropped from her twig and hung gracefully before me, leading me through the clearings in her bush.

“What’s doing skywards these days?” I asked as she hung there, iridescent even in the shadows.

She lighted on a branch at eye view, batting her eyelids. “Sweets for the sucking, sir. I met a modish macaw mid-morning. Big beautiful beak on that boy.”

In amongst the campy entertainment is the seep of abuse. Not just of the birds, who have been strangled, had their thin legs snipped of. The birds belong to Mitch, a shady figure, captured in one of Sam McWilliams’ charming illustrations which dot the book as a shadow, as a menace at the foot of a bed containing his stepdaughter. Gwen.

Gwen’s stifled rage is expressed many times, as Walker Geon, pigeon with a gun and fedora, whose name partially echoes that of his client, attempts to crack the case. It sits oddly. Sometimes in skinny, bracketed-off intrusions into the text:

Unloading the back

of the pickup truck

into the alleyway.

Gwen in blue

flannel stacks logs

for the woodstove. If she wanted to,

if the time were right,

she could easily

pull the right log

out from the middle

of the pile in the back

of the truck

and the top ones

would roll down

and crush him.

It would be so easy,

And there’s also the rifle

next to the nightstand

where they keep

the Polaroids.

And the other one

under the bed.

And yet seems to work. As contrast, rather than as dissonance. The playful detective tale against the angst and loneliness of Gwen’s life. It altogether hints that one is the product of the other, though nothing is explicit. Particularly affecting is the rambling note Gwen writes but does not give to her mother:

Dear Mom,

If I went away from here and you didn’t know where I was and I was this teenage prostitute getting beat up by my pimp or maybe even getting killed because I would be hitch hiking, and if I left you alone so you could be with Mitch and take care of the birds, nobody would have to fight anymore. […] If I did that, and then I came home when everything was back to normal, and I went to school and I had my own money, and never asked for anything and never called you names and never said ‘I want to die’ anymore and didn’t eat in the living room[…] if I came back after I became more mature and acted right and left you two alone, would you want me again? Please tell me yes or no.

Love Always,

Gwen

Pitch-perfect as a letter written by a girl in despair. A girl who believes autonomy, or pity at the very least, can come through what she clearly views as her being changed by either sex or death. Both in her mind on the spectrum of violence. I remember the opening scene. The hymen-cutting. The desire not to be a virgin, and thus not a child, and to achieve this by means of violence, an act so without self-loving that it is painful, so painful to witness. And to know that it is a response to abuse, to the constraints of living in the house of an abuser, unacknowledged and doubting ever to be believed. In the light of this, talking goodhearted, gruff Walker Geon the pigeon is an absurdity Gwen can bear. A welcome drift into fantasy.

So, it is true that this is a book made for ‘very old young adults’, not perhaps, not for them as an audience, but dedicated to them. For those who seek to be older, for heartbreaking reasons. For those who put their wishes on the backs of birds who do not, but may, fly.

Helen McClory was raised in both rural and urban Scotland. She has lived in Sydney and New York City and is currently to be found in the South Side of Edinburgh overlooking a prehistoric cliff face. The manuscript of her first novel KILEA won the Unbound Press Best Novel Award 2011, and publication is currently being sought for it. To keep the wire steady, Helen is working on a second novel about the intersections of love, failure and technology set in New York, New Mexico and Cornwall. Progress on this at: http://schietree.wordpress.com/