How you feel about New Zealand author Judith White's latest novel The Elusive Language of Ducks (Random House) will depend very much on your feelings toward animals. Anyone who doesn't care much for them is likely to dismiss the story's main character, Hannah, as losing the plot, fairly early in the piece. Those who love them, however, will have more sympathy and tolerance.
Childless Hannah is grieving for her dead mother. She's withdrawn and depressed, so her husband, Simon, brings home an orphaned duckling for her to rear. It's a thoughtful act he will come to regret, for although at first Hannah is reluctant to take on this helpless ball of fluff, it very quickly fills a gap in her life, satisfying a need to nurture. She tends it carefully, hand-feeding it squashed snails and bits of dandelion leaf. She carries it round the house, lets it sleep snuffled in the crook of her arm. Soon the duck and Hannah bond, leaving Simon resentful and displaced.
Increasingly obsessed, Hannah holds long conversations with "Ducko". She worries if she has to leave him alone, talks and dreams about him, observes closely as his yellow fluff turns to down and he grows into an adolescent.
By now the non-lovers of animals will be impatient with Hannah, just as her husband is. But it's easy enough to see why she prefers her feathered friend to most of the humans in her life. Sulky, pedantic husband Simon, selfish sister Maggie and her drug addict husband Toby, Eric the taciturn neighbour; her connection with the duck seems more satisfactory than her relationship with any of them, and certainly less complicated.
