Featherhood - Charlie Gilmour

 

When you’re bookish kind of person sometimes people hesitate to gift you books at birthdays and Christmas. There is this misconstrued belief that because you are inclined to reading that you’ve “read everything“. (I wish!) I have one friend who always asks me what book I would like. It’s brilliant. Yes, it takes the surprise out of the gift but I love knowing that I’m going to be able to choose a book. (She didn’t this Christmas though. She knitted me a scarf and sent me the box set of Schitt’s Creek!) but another friend was bold enough to take a gamble and buy me a book. And it was an absolute delight. To be presented with something that you were unaware of, you knew nothing about. ‘T’is a joyous thing.

 

Ostensibly a memoir about a man raising a magpie chick through to maturity, Green light for a sustained piece of nature writing, but it’s so much more than that. The raising of the bird becomes almost a metaphor for one man trying to find himself and exorcise the ghosts of his past. The obvious play on words from the title is inspired.

The author is the son of Heathcote Williams, poet, amongst other things, who absented himself from the young Charlie’s life. And so through the parallel telling of the development of a little magpie and his demanding lifestyle we learn of the author’s struggles. We are offered insights into the nature and nurture dilemma. And, by no means unique, we are once again treated to the therapeutic and healing powers that nature can offer us. And that uncanny sense that animals have of knowing when the time is right. 

It’s a remarkably frank and open book. The author is articulate at expressing his confusions and his hurt and his innermost feelings about some of the challenges that adulthood is throwing at him. With eloquent prose that meanders towards the poetic on than one occasion we learn of a life lived in a paradox of hurt from one direction and love from other directions. 

I found references to mental institutions, prisons, aviaries and nests as a metaphor for the prisons that we can find ourselves in, sometimes through no fault of our own. And I suppose the book is about how to deal with those and how to break out of them. It’s poignant and there is a sense of sadness running through it but a sadness that ultimately breaks through to a moving redemption.

Magpie sometimes get a bad rap. And I don’t wanna crow about it but after you read this book I don’t think you’ll ever pass a magpie again without rethinking your opinions of the species.