Wardini Book Review: Bird Life – Anna Smaill (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38.00)

Bird Life, by Kiwi author Anna Smaill, covers grief and the impact it can have on different people.

Opinion

Dinah, a young woman from New Zealand, is living and working in Tokyo, escaping as far as she can from the devastation wrought by her twin brother’s suicide.

Yasuko is a single mother whose son is at university, and about to fly the nest, attempting to confront her own grief.

The novel begins in a park with a prologue in which a distressed woman lies on the ground whilst another marches, dishevelled toward her.

There is a lot going on in this scene – a suited young man attempts to catch a pigeon, interchangeable office workers eat lunch, dogs bark, and a baby takes her first step.

It’s a sharply brilliant foreshadowing of things to come and draws the reader into this hypnotic world.

The story follows Dinah as she arrives in Japan, avoids her mother’s phone calls and begins her new job as a native English-language teacher at a science and engineering university.

Her accommodation is dull and silent, she never sees anyone and sits in the garden of her apartment block drinking vending machine alcohol: ‘she felt the mercy of mild drunkenness.’

Yasuko is a Japanese English-language teacher: striking, strong, sometimes cruel, often amusing. She has been waiting for her powers to return, the days during which she has an all-encompassing knowledge of how the world works, and can converse with every living creature.

When she meets Dinah the two women wrap their sadness around the relationship, finding hope and comfort in one another, albeit in strange ways.

At the heart of the book is grief and how this can affect our individual realities. The characters’ perceptions and experiences are rendered so clearly as to keep the reader guessing as to the nature of the novel’s ‘truth.’

Bird Life is immersive, beautifully constructed and fascinating in its portrayal of love and sorrow and the ways in which a mind constructs its world.

It’s a fresh, beautifully written book, perfect for a reader looking for something out of the ordinary.