The Language of Birds

Both title and cover of The Language of Birds are enigmatic so I ignored the blurb and plunged straight in hoping for a surprise.

A trace of originality ensued but hardly sensational.  A country girl from the Fens hears birds speaking, and that leads to a psychiatrist, to institutional treatment and a meeting with another girl with her own problems, but both alike in their difference from other people, their alienation.

A close friendship is forged between the two and, with the introduction of deep affection and an eccentric but perceptive psychiatrist, the situation stabilizes. These are not mad women. Plain, plump Rosemary (the one who hears the birds talking) goes to London and becomes a Norland nanny, followed by Mandy, the pretty one, who, without qualifications, finds employment in caring for the children of another young woman, a countess, and herself wildly unpredictable, even unbalanced. Immediately Mandy is involved in a bitter custody fight over the children whose father has detectives watching the house…Suddenly everything clicks: the father is an earl, a gambler, an alleged monster; we have been here before. I turn back to the blurb.

Yes, it’s the Lucan case. Not a rehash but a novel inspired by the murder.  It’s based on the affair and told from the point of view of the nanny, or rather both nannies because Rosemary makes a substantial contribution, and occasionally the author obtrudes objectively, playing god. As does the reader of course:  an awed and often appalled  spectator who knows the background as it was interpreted by the media of the time, a reader who knows every excruciating detail of the dreadful climax. Few people know the denouement as yet but Lucan’s final actions are of little interest compared with the fate of the nanny.

In the book there is a slow but inexorable build-up between the warring parents offset by Mandy’s passionate delight in her gorgeous Caribbean lover; there are her ominous encounters with the earl in the park, the emphasis on her night off (Thursday):  all fiction shadowing reality, all shrouded in a miasma of dread. The reader is lost, accepting  without demur that Rosemary’s voices return, now accompanied  by the gift of second sight; you accept her knowledge of what is going to happen, momentarily forgetting that it wasn’t Rosemary but Mandy who went down those basement steps to make a cup of tea.

This is less a crime novel than a tract, a political statement. Immaterial how much it echoes real events or departs from fact, how much of the nanny’s inner life is imaginary, or the details of her exciting new lover, even whether the earl had a kindly side to him; none of that matters. This is a book about violence and redeeming compassion, about loyal and often blinkered women. It left me not shocked but breathless. Forget the Lucan story, The Language of Birds is a fine novel and can stand on its own merits.