It’s all too easy to begin hiding yourself away from the world, especially if you’re told repeatedly that this is something wrong with you, that people will reject you if they know.
Or even if they don’t.
Sometimes that rejection and sense of fear can be cruelly anticipatory, foreseeing problems that might arise and hiding yourself away to avoid the prophesied or supposed worst from finding devastating realisation.
But hiding takes its toll, and whether the threat is real or imagined, it damages you, making it hard to believe you are lovable, that you belong, and that you can be connected to the human race, something Owen Tanner, the startlingly alone protagonist of Emme Lund’s The Boy With a Bird in His Chest, discovers over the first seventeen of an intensely lived life secreted away in the shadows.
He’s in the margins and the small, unnoticed places of life because his mother, who has him before she’s even out of her teens, fears that the Army of Acronyms (doctors, cops, anyone in authority) will come for a boy with a literal bird in his chest, more interested in his differences than in the commonality of his shared humanity.
The sad truth is, and it is borne far too often in this wondrously thoughtful and heartfelt novel – though there are also many instances where Owen’s palpable difference, of a small bird in his chest named Gail full of light, jokes and calming, hopeful, wise reassurance, is unreservedly accepted too – is that the world abhors those who do not conform to its rigid patterns of acceptability.
“‘Take it easy,’ Gail whispered up to him.
But he didn’t want easy. He wanted different. He wanted change. Really, what Owen wanted was the freedom of possibility he’d felt at the Fort two months earlier. he wanted to feel like the Army of Acronyms could be destroyed or at least be avoided. He went inside.” (P. 171)
Fearful of the society’s propensity to disavow and hurtfully scorn those who do not slot neatly into easily understood and verified parameters, Owen’s mother hides him away in their home in Montana, and then when that sanctuary of dubious mental and emotional wellbeing is compromised, with his uncle Bob and cousin Tennessee in the forest near Olympia in Washington state.
At first, Owen, who loves Gail who loves him back, both aware of their mutual dependence – he dies, she dies – accepts the tight circumscribing of his world, acknowledging without question that this is how it must be.
But as he grows older, and the earlier stirring of teenage questioning begins to make its disruptive presence felt, he begins sneaking out, eager to see the outside the world, and although he’s consciously unaware of this at the time, to find connection with other people.
For all of the hiding and concealing his life involves – people like him are known as Terrors, a highly emotive pejorative term that immediately tags him as an outcast and a threat without even beginning to understand or get to know him – he slowly begins to build bonds with others in Olympia, first his cousin Tennessee, then her friends like Ava and Lou and Comet, and then finally a quiet guy named Clyde, who has oceans in his eyes and to whom Owen is irresistibly drawn.
While The Boy With a Bird in His Chest definitely possesses a queer sensibility, something it treats as entirely part of the normal fabric of life, whether the moral gatekeepers of our tightly defined world believe or not, and which it quietly but passionately celebrates, it is also a story possessed of a universal accessibility and truthfulness.
If you have ever felt different in anyway, if you have ever felt metaphorically like you have a bird in your chest – the title is, rather wonderfully, both literal and poetic – then you will find much to love and with which to identify in The Boy With a Bird in His Chest.
It is a reassuring hug of great import and meaning, a powerfully nuanced and elegantly, thoughtfully and resonantly written story of how we are often pushed when we are different, particularly when we are queerly different (something this review knows all too well, forced to hide his true self for years from bullies, church arbiters and those with minds too small for new thoughts), to hide who we truly are away from others for fear we will be rejected and worse.
Owen experiences all this, and has to deal with a great deal of pain and rejection and a debilitating sense that everyone is abandoning him, if they are ever given the chance to know him in the first place, but as The Boy With a Bird in His Chest progresses in ways both terrible and sublimely wonderful, Owen realises that his aching cry to be connected, to be loved and to be treasured for his authentic self can be answered.
“‘Life is not easy for those of us who are different,’ his mother said. ‘It is not easy for people who are similar to others. Life will never be easy for you, but I thought you should know that you’re not alone. There are plenty like you. You just have to find each other. It will be easier if you can find each other. Then, no more hiding.'” (p. 275)
He’s honestly not entirely sure his searching, surging questioning will ever attract a reply, hidden away as he is by his mother, shunned by townsfolk and isolated by prisons of his own making, his only life experience being the impelling need to secrete himself away where no one can ever see him, know him or hurt him.
It’s as he begins to disentangle people knowing him from hurting him, and this is people really knowing him, Gail and her resident hole in his chest and all, that he begins to discover the luminously transcendent joy of letting someone in.
It’s terrifying when someone gets to know the full landscape and length and breadth and truth of you but it is also wonderful in ways brilliantly and endlessly liberating when you, all of which Owen discovers when he comes to understand that his attraction to Clyde, with considerable troubles of his own, is far more than a simple friendship.
It is, in fact, the answer to his lifelong question of whether he will be loved and unconditionally accepted, and as it plays out and Owen comes to understand how big the world can be, and how he can find a real and loving place in it, you soar as he does on the ineffably uplifting final act of The Boy With a Bird in His Chest which celebrates the wonder of connection, belonging, acceptance and unvarnished truth, and how it can be real and not simply a pipedream conjured up by a lonely boy on a beach wondering if the water will swallow him or he will swim through it.
He is convinced for the longest time that it will swallow him and he will never be seen again, that this is the only reasonable outcome of his life, but while it is fiercely honest, and uncompromisingly stark about the way in which the world robs from us when it tries to push out of sight or force us to hide ourselves away, The Boy With a Bird in His Chest also offers beautiful, enlivening and genuinely heartfelt hope that openness, thought scary, can be a way forward and that once you step down that road, with likeminded souls around you, the destination can be far more beautiful and thrillingly, affirmingly alive, that you had ever been led to expect.