(courtesy Hachette Australia)
How often do you wonder, as you life races with thoughtless heed and speed on, where all those innocent hopes and dreams of your youth disappeared to?
Even if you have had something approaching a charmed existence, there are moments when the shape of life around you moves from blurry, background wallpaper to the unceasing pellmell of life to sharp relief and you realise what you have is nothing like you expected it to be.
It’s a juddering shock to the system for those of us with lives that are reasonably happy but what about those who have landed a million miles away from the promise, such as it was, of yesteryear, or who are stuck in an endlessly arduous continuation of the same old same old darkness and sadness that charactised the beginning of their blighted existence?
It’s the lives of these people that are explored with achingly poetic beauty and brilliance, and it must be said for all the exquisitely descriptive writing which is like a song on the page, with real, grounded emotional honesty, by Rose Ruane in Birding, a novel which takes places in a seaside town in the UK which, like two of its resident, has seen far, far better days.
Lydia and Joyce, whose lives have had entirely divergent trajectories until now, find themselves finally coming to after an adult lifetime and realising, in ways slow and sometimes revelatory, that they must do something to arrest the inertia of their lives, as unrealistic as that seems.
Now Henry is gone, Pandora is gone, there is no one to call and Lydia is stranded inside the ballroom curtains at The Hotel Duchess Royale with nothing but her victimhood for company.
Both these characters are written with so much brutal honesty by Ruane that you wonder how either gets out of bed in the morning.
Lydia, once one half of a flash-in-the-pan girl pop duo, has never really recovered from the dissolution of her musical dream which she realises with the sobriety of adulthood, was never all that good anyway, and certainly not lived or realised on her own terms.
Beset by a record company and PR people who molded her and bandmate Pan into shapes unrecognisable to them in hindsight, Lydia stumbled from the breakdown of her brief moment of zeitgeist domination into an abusive relationship whose narcissistic architect, Henry, a famous playwright with an image to tend to, has crawled out of the woodwork begging her to forgive him.
It’s all false and self-serving of course, and while Lydia suspects that, she finds it hard, at least at first, to divorce herself from the idea that she might be responsible for much of her own pain when in fact it’s Henry who wielded the weapon of destruction and left her flailing and unable to right herself.
Much of Birding documents how Lydia, far from perfectly and with more missteps than surefooted movement forward, finally begins to find her voice and sense of self and finally live life on her terms and not the broken, blighted terms of someone else, especially someone who hurt her so terribly.
(photo by Eoin Carey, courtesy Jo Unwin Literary Agency)
Joyce, the other main character in Birding – she and Lydia largely share alternating chapters – sadly never got a momentary moment to shine.
Unlike Lydia’s brief moment of life lived large, Joyce has always lived small and under the oppressive thumb of her mother, Betty, a narcissistically poisonous woman who has never got over her fall from the higher rungs of society – Joyce’s dad got into financial trouble many years earlier and left them both rather than face the dour notes of the fiscal music – and who keeps Joyce shoved into the same miserable box as her, their lives over before they even began.
Well Joyce’s at least; she’s a forty-six-year-old woman who dresses the same as her mother, who isn’t allowed out by herself and whose world is so suffocatingly closed in and tightly circumscribed that there’s no room for even a hint of real living.
But as Birding picks up speed, and Joyce discovers that all those things she was told she shouldn’t have are in fact everything her slowly awakening heart desires, the caged animal inside her begins to long for freedom and actively seek out ways to make it become a reality.
While both stories are equally as compelling, there’s something about Joyce’s journey, which didn’t even hint at hopes and dreams being fulfilled because they weren’t allowed to be formed in the first place, that affects you more because she lost everything before she even found it.
Joyce stands. She drifts over to the small window in the corner of the living room, where — if she angles herself correctly, side on, teetering on tiptoes — Joyce can just about glimpse a scrap of the sea.
Remarkably, the lives of these two women somewhat converge at the exact same time as they are discovering that life is far from over for either of them and that maybe, just maybe, there is a chance for some happiness, after all.
What makes Birding so moving and immersively involving is that Ruane doesn’t pretend for a second that either woman is on some Eat, Pray, Love journey to instant success and happiness.
They have to work hard, so very hard for their minor epiphanies and steps forward and their revelations arrive piecemeal and with a great deal of soul searing searching and brokenness, proof that while life can be redeemed, it often feels like its fighting tooth and nail to stop you grabbing joy from misery.
Likely their greatest opponents are themselves, and Birding does a beautifully affecting job of demonstrating how tough it can be, but how liberating if you can manage it, to shut down years of the same negative internal monologue and to tell yourself another self-story about who you are and what you want.
It’s also brutally but empathetically honest about how hard it can be to finally run free, even if you quiet the voice that says you can’t do it, when you have been hobbled by the pain of broken live experience; it’s not just a matter of fixing the mind but the heart too and getting the two to work in unison so you can finally LIVE in a way that matters.
Birding is, for all its bleak loss and brokenness (and biting humour), a novel of hope and possibility, and while it’s hard-won, the fact is that it’s there, and as the novel finishes we see two women who are in a wholly different places to where they began and who know that while life doesn’t magically get better, it does have the capacity to improve and come alive if only you can give yourself permission to leave jails of your own and others making and to see what lies ahead in a future you dared not contemplate in your now-abandoned broken places.