Grief is the Thing with Feathers.

I recently included a link to a podcast that featured authors David Mitchell and Jasper Fforde where, at the end of the program(me), they each had to recommend one book and make the case for it in some brief period of time – I think it was three minutes – after which the host would choose the winner. Fforde didn’t take it very seriously, naming the owner’s manual for his car, but Mitchell recommended a book by Max Porter called Grief is the Thing with Feathers, reading a passage from it as part of his allotted time. The prose was so unlike anything I’d heard before that I felt like I had to read it immediately – easy enough to do since the book is a scant 114 pages – to see how Porter could stretch that lyrical yet dark language into something the length of a novella.

The novel is certainly about grief, telling the story of a young father of two boys whose wife has just died unexpectedly, and who is understandably consumed by his grief. He is assisted, in a way, in his grieving process by the Crow, a probably-imaginary being who speaks to the Dad and protects the three of them, but isn’t always as helpful as he thinks he is, and brings his own stories of woe and insecurity. The narrative rotates from the Dad to the Crow to the Boys and back again as it traces the path of their grief from shortly after the wife and mother has died to the point where the Crow decides to leave because his work is done.

Porter’s technique here means that the book is all dialogue and internal monologue, yet he infuses so much of it – notably Crow’s, but the Dad’s as well – with imagery and a sort of curious wordplay, where Crow seems to be trying words out for the sounds of them, that it comes off a lot like poetry. Prose doesn’t look or sound or feel like this, at least not in the sorts of literature I inhabit, and it enhanced the sense of magical realism throughout the book in a way that made Crow seem far less ridiculous, even when Dad explicitly refers to him to the Boys as imaginary.

The grief of the father in Grief is the Thing with Feathers comes through intensely on these pages, with no efforts by Porter to soften or deflect the blows. The fact that the wife died without warning – it is explained how later in the book – gives the Dad’s grief an acute edge to it, combining the emotional abyss with the realization that he is now a single father of two boys who will now look to him for the emotional and physical support they had received from their mother. Porter tries to take us inside his suffering, and then gives us Crow as the foil who challenges the father in a way that helps the father towards healing without obviously (or mawkishly) doing so.

The Crow’s passages are the most memorable, and the most poetic. He’s part fabulist, part black humorist, part wordsmith: “He flew a genuflection … Ley lines flung him cross-country with no time for grief, power cables catapulted loose bouquets of tar-black bone and feather and other crows rained down from the sky.” Perhaps my favorite of Crow’s words are a bit of apparent doggerel, starting with “Gormin’ere, worrying horrid. Hello elair, krip krap krip krap who’s that lazurusting beans of my cut-out?” but ending with the revelation that “I do this, perform some unbound crow stuff, for him.”

Mitchell is himself a brilliant writer, and his recommendation was good enough for me to read Grief is the Thing with Feathers, especially when I saw how short it was. It’s one of the most remarkable novellas – not a novel, certainly, not when it’s probably less than 30,000 words – I’ve read in years, like little else I’ve ever seen, for its prose, and for its unflinching look inside the grief of losing one’s partner at the peak of love and life.

Next up: I’m treating myself with something a bit more fun than my other recent reads, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Falling Free, the first book (by chronological order) in her Vorkosigan saga series of novels.