A Bird in the House by Margaret Laurence

Regular visitors to StuckinaBook will know how much I adore Margaret Laurence, and particularly here Manawaka sequence of novels. They have a little overlap, though can be read independently – and it includes some of the best novels I’ve read in recent years, particularly A Jest of God. The only one of the five I hadn’t read was the penultimate in the sequence, A Bird in the House (1970), and is the only one that’s not really a novel: it’s a series of linked stories about a young girl called Vanessa.

Through her eyes, steadily growing up over the course of the stories, we see a family tied together and falling apart. She is loyally close to her father and sporadically close to her mother; a little brother is born in one story; she fears some grandparents and adores others. The patterns and habits of her family are all she knows, and she details them with the interest of an anthropologist and the familiarity of a constant observer.

The world is a kaleidoscope of people and philosophies, and Vanessa is gradually working out who she is and what she stands for. But it is a curious blend of perspectives – because it is not really through the eyes of eight-year-old Vanessa, but 40-year-old Vanessa looking back. The naivety and newness of everything is layered with the reflections of a middle-aged woman remembering them.

This blend comes most to the fore in the way Aunt Edna is depicted. She is unmarried, looking after Vanessa’s cantankerous grandfather but also dependent on him. As a child, Vanessa loves and admires Edna, accepting her role as an inevitable part of the fabric of her life. But the older Vanessa clearly feels a whole range of emotions to Edna – pities her position, hopes for her, admires her spirit, recognises the limits on it. As a narrator, she is rather older than this spinster aunt – who, to young Vanessa, of course seems old. Through the stories, Laurence masterly weaves these complexities. The last line of this paragraph is brilliant, and quintessentially Laurence:

If someone coming to the Brick House for the first time chance to light a cigarette when Grandfather was home, he gave them one chance and that was all. His warning was straightforward. He would walk to the front door, fling it open, and begin coughing. He would then say, “Smoky in here, ain’t it?” If this had no effect, he told the visitor to get out, and no two ways about it. Aunt Edna once asked me to guess how many boyfriends she had lost that way, and when I said “I give up – how many?” she said “Five, and that’s the gospel truth.” At the time I imagined, because she was laughing, that she thought it was funny.”

Another instance of her lovely turns of phrase comes in a story about Piquette Tonnerres – a character and family overlapping intriguingly with one of the major families in the next book in the Manawaka sequence, The Diviners: “I could not reach Piquette at all, and I soon lost interest in trying. But all that summer she remained as both a reproach and a mystery to me.”

Each story was published separately and can be read separately – so we see Vanessa grow up, but we are also reintroduced to the family each time. Impressively, it doesn’t feel repetitive or annoying to read so many introductions in sequence – it feels, rather, like a fresh development on each character whenever we meet them again.

I think the stories I liked most were the ones about particular people who come briefly onto the scene. The one about Piquette, ‘The Loons’, is a good example. Another is ‘The Half-Husky’, about a local boy who torments her pet dog (which is quite hard to read). Laurence is too sophisticated to give her stories a neat message, but we are pulled towards moral conclusions that never quite coalesce. Vanessa is clearly learning, though doesn’t come to any finalities. Rather, these stories show us experiences and wonderings and leave behind an impression of beauty and brutality intertwined. Nothing is sentimental in these stories, but somehow they are touching. Adult Vanessa clearly has a mix of nostalgia and sadness about her childhood – not least because of a tragedy that happens almost incidentally in one chapter, then spreads out like dye in water throughout the others.

Laurence is at her best, I think, when she can really lean into the development of a character and examine every aspect of their emotional life. It’s why A Jest of God remains her masterpiece, in my eyes. But A Bird in the House is excellent too – beautiful writing, extraordinary knowledge of human character, and moments that will certainly remain in my mind. Now I’ve finished the Manawaka sequence, the only real question is when I’ll go back and read them all again.