(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Weaving a mystery into any story is a thing of consummate skill and almost beauty.
One wrong foot either way, however, with too much or too little revealed, too early or too late and the entire beguiling narrative, at least the envisaged one, falls into a messy pile of red herrings, slight-if-hands and enigmatic moments.
If an author can manage to keep all of their novel’s mysterious balls in the air without a collapse fall to the narrative ground, it’s an impressive feat, all the more so if they are able to craft a mystery within that mystery as there is, to winning effect, in Freya Berry’s slice of gothic deliciousness, The Birdcage Library.
In this tale set partly in the late nineteenth century and partly in the 1930s, Freya introduces us to Emily Blackwood, a plant collector with a number of successful expeditions around the world to her credit and a taste for adventure that sees her happily head off to where tantalising wonders may lie.
But when she accepts a new commission to catalogue all of an old man’s taxidermied animals in a remote and hauntingly beautiful part of Scotland, it’s out of economic necessity with the Great Depression having wiped out the funds that had allowed her and her father to lead a relatively comfortable, thought not lavish, existence.
I looked at him a moment, thinking of the girl I had been at the cage factory, her head filled with empty dreams. The woman who had married, hoping for an augmentation of the soul, for other worlds than this. And the creature I was now, her whole being narrowed to the man before her. ‘Perhaps. But look at the emporium, Henry. The best most of us can hope for is to find comfort inn our cages.’
But as is the way with anything that has a tinge of gothic mystery, and The Birdcage Library has that and much, much more, what Emily expects and what she actually encounters are too quite different things as it emerges, first slowly and then in a rush that Henry Vogel, the owner of the castle to which she goes to work, has a far darker agenda than he first let on.
In fact, so great are his secrets and so simmeringly deadly their execution – quite what that all involves is best left to the reading which will stoke and enthrall your imagination to a feverishly page-turning degree – that Emily, who comes across far more than just stuffed animals in her journeys through the partly-ruined castle, soon wonders whether the swirling mystery that consumes Henry might also ensnare her too?
If that sounds like an invitation to a dazzlingly twisty-turny mystery it most certainly is, and part of what makes The Birdcage Library so brilliantly readable is that Freya engrossingly sustains the slow-burning, utterly enrapturing mystery throughout the novel, doling out a revelation here and an insight there and pulling at the threads of multiple decades of hiding and secrets until they all come crashing upon Emily.
The road to that point is a fiendishly clever one and you will marvel at the way the many parts of the story, both past and present, come crashing together so thrillingly well and how not one foot in put wrong, so that while you are getting come answers, an air of furtively threatening, nuanced mystery remains still.
(courtesy Watson Little)
But, of course, what would a blindingly good mystery be, or a mystery within a mystery, if there weren’t broken, fallible people at its core?
The Birdcage Library has them in spades, and yes, a literal one does come in handy at one particularly revelatory part of the story, enlivening the mystery of what is going on at Parras, the castle on the loch, with a beguiling sense of humanity’s ability to bring itself down to nothing even as the world potentially lies at its feet pervading every last page.
Pretty much everyone in the novel has a secret of some kind, and while some are highly destructive and some are desperately sad, they are all the product of people making what they believe are the best decisions at the time, blinded by either character flaws, traumatic situations or a need to preserve a particular perspective to avoid hurt or loss.
No decision, especially ones made under stress of any kind, has no consequences, and so it is in The Birdcage Library which is an instructive lesson in how a momentary twist of the existential knife or a caving into the demands of the heart can have far-reaching repercussions down the decades, so much so that dealing with becomes both a thing of sorrow and terror, depending on where you are standing when the consequential birds of your flawed decision-making come home to roost.
Sporting an atmospheric of intrigue and melancholic claustrophobia where no one is as they seem, and we mean no one, The Birdcage Library dwells in the midst of the before and after in a number of people’s lives and how nothing is ever truly left behind in the past.
The fingers paused – snatched amongst the cotton entrails. They had found something. A fragment of paper. Yves stepped forward to look, and despite myself, I did the same. I could not see what was upon it, so I watched Mr Vogel’s face, the eyes grown black as the loch, unnamed things swimming within. No one spoke.
Then, wordlessly, methodically, he tore the paper into tiny pieces.
Seen from Emily’s vantage point throughout, the story of The Birdcage Library is one that can’t help but capture your attention because not only does it have a mystery within a mystery to solve – if that’s not bang for your reading buck, I’m not sure what is – it gives you plenty of accessible points for you to feel empathy with many, though not all of the characters (some of whom are odious and souredly broken long before Emily encounters them), and thus, feel invested in the storyline in a way that feels quite unique.
Much of what makes The Birdcage Library tick along so beautifully is that we can understand why people would have done, or do, many of the things they do; Freya never paints any character into a corner, and while there are clearly some you will appreciate more than others – and some you will like not at all – you will be able to see why they took the course they did, a realisation that enriches the events of the narrative all the more.
With a clarion call to stop seeing nature as a resource not to be plundered rather than a thing of beauty and inestimable riches to be fulsomely treasured, The Birdcage Library is a fiercely clever and thoughtful book that shines a harsh but forgiving light on humanity foibles, depending again on which character is in the narrative hot seat, and which serves up a fantastically luscious and intriguing mystery that unfolds at just the right pace and arrives at a just-so point that reminds you how our actions can come back to us but that they can also, executed properly and at the right time, save us too.