A Bird in the House

I like reading short stories even though the form confounds me a bit. I've heard it said that short stories are harder to write than novels, so I often wonder why an author like Alice Munro chooses the format, and as a reader, as much as I love her collections, I feel a bit deflated as each story ends and I am compelled to pause and decide if I want to immediately start the process of meeting and understanding a whole new cast of characters on the next page. With A Bird In The House, Margaret Laurence blends the two formats with eight short stories about the same family, all from the perspective of Vanessa MacLeod, jumping back and forth between the ages of eight and fortyish. This felt like a bit of a cheat to me: even though I understand that each story appeared on its own in some magazine or other over the years, it was hard to consider each a complete work, knowing that the narrative would continue, that the characters and setting would be familiar, right there on the next page. This isn't a complaint, it just read like a novel instead of a collection of short stories, and it was a satisfying way of jumping through time to watch Vanessa mature and find her place in her family and the wider world.

The title of A Bird in the House has two meanings. In the first, Vanessa's gentle grandmother Connor has a pet canary:

She would try to coax the canary into its crystal trilling, but it was a surly creature and obliged only occasionally…When I asked my grandmother if the bird minded being there, she shook her head and said no, it had been there always and wouldn't know what to do with itself outside, and I thought this must surely be so, for it was a family saying that she couldn't tell a lie if her life depended on it.

In grandmother Connor's view, the world is a scary place and staying in the safe and familiar (even remaining married to an abusive bully of a man) is preferable to venturing into the unknown. I am routinely astounded by the strength of the women in Margaret Laurence's books. While the people of grandmother Connor's generation might have valued respectability and the good opinions of neighbours above all (and submitting to this can take its own form of courage), their granddaughters, the Hagars and Morags and Vanessas, are given the self-awareness to rebel against these stifling restrictions and seek a selfish fulfillment, that by today's standards, is every person's birthright. I can be a bit impatient with strident feminism, but I do appreciate how far women have come in a relatively short period, thanks to the brave social pioneers who came before. Although grandmother Connor wasn't lying when she said that she didn't think the canary minded the cage, Maya Angelou, of the brave social pioneering generation, got it truer:

The free bird leapson the back of the windand floats downstreamtill the current endsand dips his wingsin the orange sun raysand dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalksdown his narrow cagecan seldom see throughhis bars of ragehis wings are clipped andhis feet are tiedso he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird singswith fearful trillof the things unknownbut longed for stilland its tune is heardon the distant hill for the caged birdsings of freedom

In the second sense of the title, a hired girl remarks, upon freeing a sparrow that had found its way through a storm window, that a bird in the house means a death in the house. Vanessa's father dies soon after and the girl realises that death was always there, waiting to strike. Whether sitting beside him at church or later finding an old love letter that had been hidden away, Vanessa realised that she never really knew her father, not his inner thoughts anyway, and this theme is repeated throughout the book. When grandmother Connor dies, the family is shocked by how hard grandfather Connor takes it, and wonder if she ever knew the depths of his feelings. When the old man himself finally dies at 96, his daughters wonder if they had been too hard on him, not understanding enough. 

My favourite story in the collection is Horses of the Night. Vanessa meets Chris, an older cousin who comes to live in Manawaka to attend high school. He has a free spirit that matches her own and they become good friends. When the circumstances of the Depression prevent him from attending university, when every plan he had to travel or make something of himself fails, he ends up back at the dirt poor farm he started out from. When Vanessa goes to visit him, he is the first person to ever freely share his innermost thoughts with her:

"People usually say there must be a God," Chris went on, "because otherwise how did the universe get here? But that's ridiculous. If the stars and planets go on to infinity, they could have existed forever, for no reason at all. Maybe they weren't ever created. Look-- what's the alternative? To believe in a God who is brutal. What else could He be? You've only got to look anywhere around you. It would be an insult to Him to believe in a God like that."

(I also like this quote because it reminded me of one of my all-time favourite quotes by John Banville in The Sea: Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.)

Vanessa is so embarrassed by Chris' naked frankness that she pretends to be asleep until he stops talking. This felt the most relatable-- there are people I can regret not knowing better, but I can also be embarrassed by the idea of closeness. One of the reasons I decided to challenge myself to write reviews here is in an effort to leave some sort of record of myself behind; this is a fairly low risk venue for putting down some memories and impressions, perhaps my kids will be interested someday in reading what I thought of some book or other, maybe a grandchild? (If I were to insert a hello, would it be from the grave?) Although this is my challenge, and one that I wish I had taken up sooner -- oh, the lovely books I have read and not reviewed! -- I can't see my sharing anything terribly personal here, or anywhere. Like Vanessa, I don't know if I would even want to know the innermost thoughts of the people around me-- I don't want to know those of my parents. I wouldn't want to know dark secrets of my grandparents. How far back would I need to go before the blood is thinned enough that I could dispassionately hear the secrets of my ancestors? How far forward would I go through the generations before I could comfortably choose a descendant to learn mine? I might be closer to grandmother Connor than Maya Angelou after all; the bird in my house doesn't long to be freed. 

A couple of nice lines to end on:

In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry.

No human word could be applied. The lake was not lonely or untamed. These words relate to people, and there was nothing of people here. There was no feeling about the place. It existed in some world in which man was not yet born. I looked at the grey reaches of it and felt threatened. It was like the view of God which I had held since my father's death. Distant, indestructible, totally indifferent.

As a final note, I am sorry that this is the last of the Manawaka Series that I had to read. Over the course of five books, Margaret Laurence created a lovely little time capsule, a true treasure.