Reviewed by Michelle Berry
Rebecca Silver Slayter’s first novel, In the Land of Birdfishes, is ambitious. A novel with five unreliable narrators and no satisfying ending takes quite a bit of courage to write. Somehow Slayter pulls it off. I think. Even though the reader might not know exactly what happened in this book, it’s still a good read. Perhaps this is because of the skill of the writer–the beauty of the sentences, the play on the Aboriginal oral tradition, the layered mystery of the plot and the five complicated and distinct characters. Slayter combines all of this to make an intriguing, if not confounding, novel.
In rural Nova Scotia, the twins, Aileen and Mara, bear witness to their mother’s suicide and, to protect them from the harsh cruelty of the world, their father binds their eyes with blindfolds. They live with these blindfolds on for years. The abuse eventually leads to Mara’s full blindness and Aileen’s partial blindness.
The children are discovered by the neighbours and separated, sent to different parts of the country to live out very different lives. Mara eventually ends up in a Catholic school for the blind, gets pregnant very young, and moves to Dawson City. Aileen marries a man who falls off a roof and suffers some brain damage. When her marriage begins to disintegrate, she decides it is time to finally look for Mara. Arriving in Dawson City Aileen finds, instead, Mara’s grown son, Jason, and thus begins the novel – a back and forth mash-up of what happens in Dawson City between Jason and Aileen. At this point we hear from Jason, Mara and Aileen, as well as from Jason’s friends, Angel and Minnie.
Each character has their own sections, some more sections than others, and each one of these five narrators has a different story to tell–a story which may or may not be true. A story that occasionally changes. Hints are dropped here and there, but in the eventual climax facts that we thought we knew are suddenly thrown out, reworded, mixed around, until the reader has no idea what really happened. The key point of the book is what happened to Mara. We hear her voice from the past only, we have been told she died, and she isn’t in Dawson City when Aileen arrives, but then things get confusing. Things aren’t always what they seem in this novel.
Jason tells Aileen what happened to Mara through his own invented stories. He leans on traditional Aboriginal stories, but he twists them for his purpose. He tells of Old Man and Old Woman as they create the world, fight, invent seasons and have two children who eventually turn against each other. Aileen is supposed to figure out what happened to Mara through these stories but she doesn’t. And neither does the reader. Aileen says, “I felt overwhelmed by the endlessness of his fantasies, his damage, his lies. I was exhausted of it all.” They are fine stories, though, full of the voice of a confident, imaginative writer, a writer who delights in imagery and metaphor and the beauty of the natural world.
Because Mara is blind her chapters are the most compelling. She interprets life in her own way, in her darkness, and the reader is pulled into her world completely. It feels at times as if Rebecca Silver Slayter wrote Mara with her eyes closed. It’s that real. Mara’s tightly woven narrative compels you to read on. After all, we need to know what happened to her:
It never came back, seeing. Shapes, here and there. Something like what I remember as colour, but only two. Black. White. Shadows. Glimpses of motion. Nothing more.
But is it enough to write beautifully? Or should a story be presented to the reader, a question asked and then answered? I was left floundering at the end of this novel because I, naively, wanted an ending. I wanted to know, really know, what happened to Mara. It’s not that Slayter merely leaves the reader hanging–countless novels do that—but she gives us five different stories which morph and twist until we don’t know who is telling the truth. One small sentence dropped, here and there, changes the plot completely. To give examples would be to give away the ending, so I can’t back up my confusion, but I’m not sure I “got” the book. I wanted to. I really respected the book. I liked a lot about it. But I was left utterly confused at the end.
What I liked most was: the charming city of Dawson (“We were at the edge of a hill that plunged down into the sprawl of a town at the base, where two rivers met… The brown river’s the Klondike and the clear one’s the Yukon. You can see them still separated there, between the dirty half and the clean half”), the bar where everyone meets and hangs out in, the midnight sun and the fact that the focus is on blindness in a world of light.
I liked Aileen’s voice, her wit and humour. I liked my nervousness around Jason–he’s always on the verge of something and I can’t quite put my finger on what that is–violence? Insanity? I liked the descriptions of the secondary characters’ lives, Minnie and Angel in their house with their mother and father and sisters and brothers, the way they all are completely different from each other in voice and action. I liked how everyone drinks beer all the time. Even though I didn’t understand the made-up stories Jason tells, I thought they were charming and exciting and dramatic and surprising.
So I’m not sure what to think about this first novel. Brave? Yes. Beautiful? Yes. Satisfying? No. But does that matter in the big scheme of things?
HarperCollins | 400 pages | $21.99 | paper | ISBN # 978-1443407373
‘In the Land of Birdfishes’ by Rebecca Silver Slayter
Book Reviews
Rebecca Silver Slayter’s first novel, In the Land of Birdfishes, is ambitious. A novel with five unreliable narrators and no satisfying ending takes quite a bit of courage to write. Somehow Slayter pulls it off. I think. Even though the reader might not know exactly what happened in this book, it’s still a good read. Perhaps this is because of the skill of the writer–the beauty of the sentences, the play on the Aboriginal oral tradition, the layered mystery of the plot and the five complicated and distinct characters. Slayter combines all of this to make an intriguing, if not confounding, novel.
In rural Nova Scotia, the twins, Aileen and Mara, bear witness to their mother’s suicide and, to protect them from the harsh cruelty of the world, their father binds their eyes with blindfolds. They live with these blindfolds on for years. The abuse eventually leads to Mara’s full blindness and Aileen’s partial blindness.
The children are discovered by the neighbours and separated, sent to different parts of the country to live out very different lives. Mara eventually ends up in a Catholic school for the blind, gets pregnant very young, and moves to Dawson City. Aileen marries a man who falls off a roof and suffers some brain damage. When her marriage begins to disintegrate, she decides it is time to finally look for Mara. Arriving in Dawson City Aileen finds, instead, Mara’s grown son, Jason, and thus begins the novel – a back and forth mash-up of what happens in Dawson City between Jason and Aileen. At this point we hear from Jason, Mara and Aileen, as well as from Jason’s friends, Angel and Minnie.
Each character has their own sections, some more sections than others, and each one of these five narrators has a different story to tell–a story which may or may not be true. A story that occasionally changes. Hints are dropped here and there, but in the eventual climax facts that we thought we knew are suddenly thrown out, reworded, mixed around, until the reader has no idea what really happened. The key point of the book is what happened to Mara. We hear her voice from the past only, we have been told she died, and she isn’t in Dawson City when Aileen arrives, but then things get confusing. Things aren’t always what they seem in this novel.
Jason tells Aileen what happened to Mara through his own invented stories. He leans on traditional Aboriginal stories, but he twists them for his purpose. He tells of Old Man and Old Woman as they create the world, fight, invent seasons and have two children who eventually turn against each other. Aileen is supposed to figure out what happened to Mara through these stories but she doesn’t. And neither does the reader. Aileen says, “I felt overwhelmed by the endlessness of his fantasies, his damage, his lies. I was exhausted of it all.” They are fine stories, though, full of the voice of a confident, imaginative writer, a writer who delights in imagery and metaphor and the beauty of the natural world.
Because Mara is blind her chapters are the most compelling. She interprets life in her own way, in her darkness, and the reader is pulled into her world completely. It feels at times as if Rebecca Silver Slayter wrote Mara with her eyes closed. It’s that real. Mara’s tightly woven narrative compels you to read on. After all, we need to know what happened to her:
It never came back, seeing. Shapes, here and there. Something like what I remember as colour, but only two. Black. White. Shadows. Glimpses of motion. Nothing more.
But is it enough to write beautifully? Or should a story be presented to the reader, a question asked and then answered? I was left floundering at the end of this novel because I, naively, wanted an ending. I wanted to know, really know, what happened to Mara. It’s not that Slayter merely leaves the reader hanging–countless novels do that—but she gives us five different stories which morph and twist until we don’t know who is telling the truth. One small sentence dropped, here and there, changes the plot completely. To give examples would be to give away the ending, so I can’t back up my confusion, but I’m not sure I “got” the book. I wanted to. I really respected the book. I liked a lot about it. But I was left utterly confused at the end.
What I liked most was: the charming city of Dawson (“We were at the edge of a hill that plunged down into the sprawl of a town at the base, where two rivers met… The brown river’s the Klondike and the clear one’s the Yukon. You can see them still separated there, between the dirty half and the clean half”), the bar where everyone meets and hangs out in, the midnight sun and the fact that the focus is on blindness in a world of light.
I liked Aileen’s voice, her wit and humour. I liked my nervousness around Jason–he’s always on the verge of something and I can’t quite put my finger on what that is–violence? Insanity? I liked the descriptions of the secondary characters’ lives, Minnie and Angel in their house with their mother and father and sisters and brothers, the way they all are completely different from each other in voice and action. I liked how everyone drinks beer all the time. Even though I didn’t understand the made-up stories Jason tells, I thought they were charming and exciting and dramatic and surprising.
So I’m not sure what to think about this first novel. Brave? Yes. Beautiful? Yes. Satisfying? No. But does that matter in the big scheme of things?
HarperCollins | 400 pages | $21.99 | paper | ISBN # 978-1443407373