Reviewed by Lynne C. Martin
Losing a parent as a child can cause all sorts of unique long-lasting consequences, many of which are seldom recognized as grief. About a third of the way through Elizabeth Philips’s lovely first novel The Afterlife of Birds, we discover that the protagonist, Henry, and his brother, Dan, lost their dad as young boys—and suddenly the idiosyncrasies of these two young men make sense. Up until this moment, uncovered slowly and gently, we see Henry as endearingly weird and Dan also weird but less endearingly so, with their quirks mere odd character traits. The book’s first several chapters are engaging and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, but once the backstory is revealed, the graceful poignancy of Philips’s story comes to life much more deeply.
The book opens with Henry’s musings on bacula—penis bones which are part of many different animal skeletons: “It occurs to Henry that the term ‘boner’ is pure Homo sapiens bravado.” Instantly we get inside Henry’s intelligent, wry worldview and are introduced to his avocation (more than a hobby, really). Henry finds dead animals, cleans the meat off their bones and reassembles their skeletons in poses of his choice. From the outset he is on a quest to find a baculum for his brother’s birthday present as a joke, though what he eventually finds is his own manhood.
Aware of his social awkwardness—“he could have a bacula display on the wall in his bedroom and pretty much guarantee that he’d never get laid again”—Henry sometimes allows his loneliness and strong sense of moral responsibility to dictate his life choices. He is deeply concerned for his brother’s well-being, even though on the surface Dan seems to have a more successful life than Henry, with a wonderful partner named Rae for whom Henry has more genuine affection than Dan does.
Unlike his self-centered brother, Henry allows life to happen to him rather than actively shaping it according to his own desires, but he also cares about the people around him. Many of his decisions are based on looking after them—his brother, the young woman whose car gets stuck in a snowdrift, his boss, Ed, at the garage, the old Russian woman whose walk he cleans and whose stories inspire him, Rae, his mother, his mother’s employee Marcie, and eventually Marcie’s infant daughter. I agree with Fred Stenson’s blurb on the book jacket: “Liz Philips has accomplished the most difficult thing in literature. She has written an original love story.” In fact, the love story is between Henry and all of these characters, including himself.
The crow skeleton Henry reconstructs throughout the narrative is the anchor of this lyrical novel. Finding the carcass while on a walk with his former girlfriend Amy, it was Henry’s rendering of it that drove her away shortly after. When the book begins, Henry has the clean bones laid out systematically on his kitchen table, and he works at putting this puzzle together as he tries to also work through the painful circumstances of his life. Henry approaches catastrophe with careful respect, methodically deconstructing and then reassembling each messy corpse into a thing of unlikely beauty.
Like Henry, crows are creatures of great intelligence whose job it is to clean up other creatures’ messes, and Philips uses this crow skeleton to symbolize Henry himself. Eventually, he stops thinking of the skeleton as “Amy’s crow,” having already seen that it needs “to have greater lift in its wings… not hesitating or choosing, but decided, committed purely to flight.” By the time he completes it, Henry has been transformed into a self-confident man who understands himself differently in relation to his brother, the women in his life, and his place in the world.
Urban prairie readers will instantly recognize the prosaic realities of a prairie city after a heavy snowfall, but Philips shows us their poetry at the same time: “the white ground is shifting, oceanic. At the intersection just before the bridge, the [car’s] undercarriage catches on a snowdrift, a grab from underneath that slows the car almost to a standstill.” So, too, will readers familiar with rural prairie life appreciate Philips’s keen sense of place when Henry travels outside of Saskatoon to his family’s farm, or when he recalls visiting the spot where his father died: “in all directions the earth beneath the supple young plants was undulating, as if a broad, shallow wave was shrugging its way from east to west beneath their feet.”
Philips thus not only beautifully paints the story’s particular setting, but she also uses the Canadian landscape to embody the changes in Henry’s emotional state. At the end of the book, on his way home from Vancouver through Drumheller, Henry walks on “shifting scree” where the “ground at his feet is hazy now, indistinct” until he encounters a large boulder he imagines like a slumbering dinosaur “that he almost expects to stir as he works his way around it.” But at last the anticipated movement is not threatening: “Everything has happened here, and will keep on happening; Henry feels the thrum of possibility under his fingertips.” His story has moved him from near standstill, over undulating, shifting ground, to a rocky pathway, which, though hazy, emerges on the “rim of the canyon [where] the sky brightens before him… as if the sun is no longer setting but rising.”
As Henry’s life gradually becomes unstuck, as his grief loses its power to frighten and devour him, and as the crow skeleton comes together piece by piece, winter turns slowly to summer, and for Henry “time will begin again.” These metaphorical devices could be tired clichés in the hands of a lesser writer, but Philips’s mature command of both structure and language, along with her compassion for her characters, results in a rich, honest tale both organic and satisfying, worth savouring more than once.
Freehand | 320 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN# 978-1554812653
‘The Afterlife of Birds’ by Elizabeth Philips
Book Reviews
Losing a parent as a child can cause all sorts of unique long-lasting consequences, many of which are seldom recognized as grief. About a third of the way through Elizabeth Philips’s lovely first novel The Afterlife of Birds, we discover that the protagonist, Henry, and his brother, Dan, lost their dad as young boys—and suddenly the idiosyncrasies of these two young men make sense. Up until this moment, uncovered slowly and gently, we see Henry as endearingly weird and Dan also weird but less endearingly so, with their quirks mere odd character traits. The book’s first several chapters are engaging and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, but once the backstory is revealed, the graceful poignancy of Philips’s story comes to life much more deeply.
The book opens with Henry’s musings on bacula—penis bones which are part of many different animal skeletons: “It occurs to Henry that the term ‘boner’ is pure Homo sapiens bravado.” Instantly we get inside Henry’s intelligent, wry worldview and are introduced to his avocation (more than a hobby, really). Henry finds dead animals, cleans the meat off their bones and reassembles their skeletons in poses of his choice. From the outset he is on a quest to find a baculum for his brother’s birthday present as a joke, though what he eventually finds is his own manhood.
Aware of his social awkwardness—“he could have a bacula display on the wall in his bedroom and pretty much guarantee that he’d never get laid again”—Henry sometimes allows his loneliness and strong sense of moral responsibility to dictate his life choices. He is deeply concerned for his brother’s well-being, even though on the surface Dan seems to have a more successful life than Henry, with a wonderful partner named Rae for whom Henry has more genuine affection than Dan does.
Unlike his self-centered brother, Henry allows life to happen to him rather than actively shaping it according to his own desires, but he also cares about the people around him. Many of his decisions are based on looking after them—his brother, the young woman whose car gets stuck in a snowdrift, his boss, Ed, at the garage, the old Russian woman whose walk he cleans and whose stories inspire him, Rae, his mother, his mother’s employee Marcie, and eventually Marcie’s infant daughter. I agree with Fred Stenson’s blurb on the book jacket: “Liz Philips has accomplished the most difficult thing in literature. She has written an original love story.” In fact, the love story is between Henry and all of these characters, including himself.
The crow skeleton Henry reconstructs throughout the narrative is the anchor of this lyrical novel. Finding the carcass while on a walk with his former girlfriend Amy, it was Henry’s rendering of it that drove her away shortly after. When the book begins, Henry has the clean bones laid out systematically on his kitchen table, and he works at putting this puzzle together as he tries to also work through the painful circumstances of his life. Henry approaches catastrophe with careful respect, methodically deconstructing and then reassembling each messy corpse into a thing of unlikely beauty.
Like Henry, crows are creatures of great intelligence whose job it is to clean up other creatures’ messes, and Philips uses this crow skeleton to symbolize Henry himself. Eventually, he stops thinking of the skeleton as “Amy’s crow,” having already seen that it needs “to have greater lift in its wings… not hesitating or choosing, but decided, committed purely to flight.” By the time he completes it, Henry has been transformed into a self-confident man who understands himself differently in relation to his brother, the women in his life, and his place in the world.
Urban prairie readers will instantly recognize the prosaic realities of a prairie city after a heavy snowfall, but Philips shows us their poetry at the same time: “the white ground is shifting, oceanic. At the intersection just before the bridge, the [car’s] undercarriage catches on a snowdrift, a grab from underneath that slows the car almost to a standstill.” So, too, will readers familiar with rural prairie life appreciate Philips’s keen sense of place when Henry travels outside of Saskatoon to his family’s farm, or when he recalls visiting the spot where his father died: “in all directions the earth beneath the supple young plants was undulating, as if a broad, shallow wave was shrugging its way from east to west beneath their feet.”
Philips thus not only beautifully paints the story’s particular setting, but she also uses the Canadian landscape to embody the changes in Henry’s emotional state. At the end of the book, on his way home from Vancouver through Drumheller, Henry walks on “shifting scree” where the “ground at his feet is hazy now, indistinct” until he encounters a large boulder he imagines like a slumbering dinosaur “that he almost expects to stir as he works his way around it.” But at last the anticipated movement is not threatening: “Everything has happened here, and will keep on happening; Henry feels the thrum of possibility under his fingertips.” His story has moved him from near standstill, over undulating, shifting ground, to a rocky pathway, which, though hazy, emerges on the “rim of the canyon [where] the sky brightens before him… as if the sun is no longer setting but rising.”
As Henry’s life gradually becomes unstuck, as his grief loses its power to frighten and devour him, and as the crow skeleton comes together piece by piece, winter turns slowly to summer, and for Henry “time will begin again.” These metaphorical devices could be tired clichés in the hands of a lesser writer, but Philips’s mature command of both structure and language, along with her compassion for her characters, results in a rich, honest tale both organic and satisfying, worth savouring more than once.
Freehand | 320 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN# 978-1554812653