Although I’ve been reading Booker Prize shortlisted novels for
quite a few years, I am glad that in August last year I decided to start a blog
and like any true manic began my Booker Prize journey by reading each shortlist
from the inaugural year, 1969, onwards, in order of course!!!! This would mean re-reading some, attempting
for the umpteenth time others, but it would also mean discovering gems amongst
the rubble. Why am I grateful I began this journey? Well, the 1971 shortlist
threw up the wonderful “Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont” by Elizabeth Taylor and
now the 1972 list has given me “The Bird of Night” by Susan Hill. Novels hard
to track down, forgotten even, and without this exercise, ones I surely would
not have sought out, but novels that this journey has given me the pleasure of
discovering.
“The Bird of Night” is a dark, bleak tale of Francis Croft,
World War One veteran and “the greatest poet of his age” who is mad. This short
novel is written as a reflective journal by Francis’ partner Harvey Lawton, old,
invalid, reclusive and hounded by researchers and biographers all wanting to resurrect
the life of Francis. The journal style quickly called to mind Sebastian Barry’s
2011 long listed “On Canaan’s Side”;
Bill is gone.
What is the sound of and
eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking? It might not be much more than silence,
and certainly a small slight sound.
or the 2005 Pulitzer Prize
winning “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson
I told you last night that I
might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good
Lord, and you said, Why, and I said because I’m old, and you said, I don’t
think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t
very old, as if that settled it.
Both journals written by the old, reflecting upon their
lives. I also drew parallels to Alan Hollinghurst’s 2011 long listed “The
Stranger’s Child” which explored the life of homosexual war poet Cecil Valance and
his literary and personal impact across generations and (of course the)
biographers coming to call. Throw in the
subject of madness, which was explored by Bernice Rubens with her Booker
winning “The Elected Member” from 1970. Or mix in the country setting of J.L.
Carr’s shortlisted “A Month in the Country” from 1980 (a tale of World War 1
veteran employed to restore a mural in a country church) and I suddenly had a plethora of similar
material which I have read (and reviewed some of them here) over the last nine
months.
However this is so much more than a tale of poetry and madness:
But understanding was not
control. If Francis knew what he was, he could not alter it, he had no power at
all over the vagaries and eruptions of his own mind. He was helpless in the
face of an attack of insanity, no matter which way it went with him, whether he
was depressed or violent, whether he was hysterical, agitated or deluded by
visions and voices.
It is also a story of relationships, the giving of oneself to
another, but at what cost? And for what reasons? This is also a tale of England
nostalgically coming to terms with life post World War One, of subtle melancholic
references to their obviously homosexual relationship together and of
reflections of better times. We know the outcome of Francis’ journey into
madness before our journey begins and the genuine remorse that our narrator must
feel becomes even more pertinent as he observes and fights the deepening
madness and depression of his lover.
A section I particularly liked was Francis reading the
reviews of his “greatest work”:
Even those who praised him the
most extravagantly had sometimes ‘no idea’, they thought they understood him
but they did not; they either read into the poem much that was not there, or
else missed much that was.
Is this Susan Hill having a dig at critics of her previous
work? Or her reference to the great mind of Francis being reduced to reading
two or three Detective novels in a sitting (in recent years Susan Hill has
written a series of crime novels featuring detective Simon Serrailler). She may also be playing with our minds with her
2006 comment; “A novel of mine was
shortlisted for Booker and won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction. It was a book I
have never rated. I don't think it works, though there are a few good things in
it. I don't believe in the characters or the story.” Interestingly
this quote is referenced in a number of reviews of “The Bird of Night” on the internet;
however the archive of Susan Hill’s blog where it was supposedly taken no
longer exists.
A bleak, depressing but enjoyable and easy read which I thoroughly
enjoyed after the slog of the winner from the same year “G”.
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