A bird is a conduit between states: air and ground, gravity and flight. In Anna Smaill’s intricate second novel (her first, The Chimes, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize) she explores the spaces between life and death, between emotional states, and the dangerous, disorienting worlds on the edge of sanity.

Bird Life follows two narrators, Dinah and Yasuko.  Dinah is from New Zealand, having just become a teacher at a Tokyo English language school. She’s mourning the death of her brother Michael, with whom she had an intensely close relationship. Michael was the genius, talented and troubled, and Dinah was his foil.  Michael was the sun around which Dinah’s life revolved, their bond seemingly psychic, sharing dreams and thoughts. Michael’s gradual slip into mental illness and subsequent death has devastated Dinah, not least because she feels responsible for not saving him. Dowdy and numb, Dinah plods through the mundane hell of teaching English in an alien environment.

By contrast Yasuko, a Japanese teacher at the same school, is glamorous and poised. Her clothes are by luxury labels, her makeup showy but perfect. Her external control hides a fluttering and desperate torment; since she was 13, Yasuko has been able to talk to animals.  A mouse gives her a terrible prediction. When it comes true, her obsession with her ‘powers’ becomes a fixation but her abilities – or the animals – are fickle. When her powers fail her, she turns her back to the world, alternating between catatonic misery and desperate attempts to woo her powers back.

Grief is the emotional link between Dinah and Yasuko. What Bird Life brings into focus is the almost inevitable, obligatory madness of grief.  We can label the psychological stages as denial or bargaining but denial and bargaining are both irrational flailings against reality, a short step from actual delusion.  Dinah begins to see Michael. He’s in her Tokyo apartment, when she goes for a walk he’s there. It’s like he never left – except he did.  Unable and unwilling to follow her brother over the threshold, she nevertheless followed him into the doorway and is stuck there, in a liminal world between life and death.

It is Yasuko, a long-term resident of the liminal, who finds and rescues Dinah, although it’s not a selfless act. In fact, selfishness is at the core of Yasuko’s grief – an astute observation by Smaill, that grieving people, instead of comforting each other can compound suffering in devastating ways.  Having stolen her son out of the clutches of his grandfather, who was trying to get Yasuko into mental health care and in her view, destroy her powers, she spares no thought for his own losses. Her pursuit of her powers several times endangers the life of her son Jun, enforcing a co-dependent emotional relationship he must escape before he can truly live, free of Yasuko’s shadows and obsessions. Losing him is her greatest tragedy, the thing she fears but is herself causing.

Smaill has created a kind of aria on the slippery madness of grief.  Bird Life’s clipped sentences, taut and crisp, have a spare Japanese aesthetic, like haiku. There is delicate lyrical beauty, precise detail and stark contrasts, like the strange shack of the animal vendor on the roof of the luxury department store where Yasuko goes to find birds and beetles for her rituals. 

In the end we are destabilised by the experience, unable to be sure what is delusion and what is magic; whether grief and love are more powerful than the prosaic and really do have the ability to change reality - and if so, what the price of that might be.

Reviewed by Ruth Spencer