THE LANGUAGE OF BIRDS by Jill Dawson, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 "The tensions between these young women’s strength and resourcefulness, the various ways in which they're exploited and their efforts to escape the tugs and burdens of the past make this an absorbing read."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She is currently working on her second novel for adults, following Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (retitled Missing Rose for the paperback edition) which was a Radio 2 Book Club Choice.

Having enjoyed the inventiveness of Jill Dawson's The Crime Writer, based on the life and work of Patricia Highsmith, I was eager to read this, a fictionalised version of the events leading to the disappearance of Lord Lucan in 1974 after the murder of his children's nanny, Sandra Rivett. In an Afterword, Jill Dawson quotes the victim’s aunt: "This entire inquest has been devoted to the life of Lord Lucan, and the life of poor Sandra has been almost ignored." The Language of Birds gives a richly-imagined life to the young woman here called Mandy Rivers. 

By chance, this is the second novel I've read this year that involves a nanny taken on at short notice and with scant investigation into her qualifications by wealthy employers who are all too ready to hand over their children to the care of a stranger (the other was Magpie Lane, by Lucy Atkins). Mandy gets her job at the instigation of her friend Rosemary, whose first-person narrative alternates with Mandy's, in third-person. A Norland-trained nanny already working in London, Rosemary covers up for Mandy's lack of qualifications and experience. Early on, we know that the two young women met at a psychiatric hospital in the East Anglian fenland, and that Rosemary was sent there after believing that pigeons had told her to kill herself. It takes longer for us to discover why Mandy was there, but the friendship and mutual support of the pair is crucial to the story.

Adaptable and kind, Mandy learns the etiquette of her new role (in a private London square, she's asked by another nanny, "Is your mummy a titled mummy? ... This is the bench reserved for titled mummies' nannies") and the strange routines of the Knightsbridge household. Lady Morven, Katharine, is harrowed by a custody battle for her children but shows little interest in them, remaining closeted in her bedroom; ‘Dickie’ (Lord Morven) keeps the house under surveillance, claiming his children on alternate weekends. Finding empathy with the troubled Katharine and hearing of threats and beatings, Mandy fears what he might do. It’s no spoiler to say that the tragic events of that November night are well foreshadowed, seeming inevitable.

To their employers and others of their class, the young women's nanny status renders them all but invisible, Rosemary often ensuring this by wearing uniform. Nonetheless, having escaped from a repressive mother, Mandy revels in her new London life and the feeling of independence, limited though her independence actually is. Jill Dawson writes very well about sex, conveying Mandy’s amazement at her physical and emotional openness with Caribbean boyfriend Neville. Having always been made to feel inadequate, she experiences this as a revelation - all the more poignant because the reader knows it will be short-lived.

The birds of the title seem to symbolise freedom and flight (and perhaps the girls themselves, in 70s idiom). We first meet Mandy newly-arrived in London and watching gulls wheeling over the Thames; to Rosemary, birds are portentous, to be feared, provoking her strange visions.

Although Rosemary attends a women’s consciousness-raising group, she's the one who's readily swayed by Dickie’s urbane charm into finding excuses for him. Too late she realises that “people make the mistakes I did. They prefer another story. The story where the woman is too sexy, too crazy, or having an affair.” The tensions between these young women’s strength and resourcefulness, the various ways in which they're exploited and their efforts to escape the tugs and burdens of the past make this an absorbing read. And I loved the 70s detail of fashion, food, music and attitudes, never overdone.

The Language of Birds is published by Sceptre.

See also Jill Dawson's The Crime Writer, reviewed by Patricia Elliott.

Guest review by Jill Dawson: NEGATIVE CAPABILITY by Michèle Roberts

"Feels like being in a café with Michèle, enjoying a glass of French wine and listening to her being funny, irreverent and political, passionate and indiscreet ..."

Jill Dawson is the author of ten novels, including The Crime Writer, about Patricia Highsmith. The latest is The Language of Birds, about the nanny murdered in the household of Lord Lucan in 1974. She runs a mentoring scheme where established writers work with new ones, Gold Dust Mentoring.

Following a series of devastating rejections, novelist and poet Michèle Roberts decided to keep an account of her life in order to make sense of her shattered sense of self. This wonderful, fearless, surprising memoir is the result. I have been recommending it lately to all my writing students because if there’s one thing all writers need to understand it’s how to cope with rejection, how to survive it and carry on writing.

I should state here that I know Michèle (she was my boss, the Director of the MA in Creative Writing when I taught at UEA) so I don’t doubt I’m biased, but I loved her writing long before I met her: its sexy openness, daring experimentation, vividness and warmth. If you haven’t read her, along with poetry and memoir and short stories, there are fourteen novels. Daughters of the House, shortlisted for the Booker, is a good place to start. 

I devoured this. An honest insight into how another writer – one as established as Roberts no less – feels when a novel gets bounced around by agents and publishers is rare. The book could be read as a companion to her earlier memoir, Paper Houses, which tells of her formative years as a young feminist in the 1970s. Alongside her thoughts on writing, on Creative Writing students who want to produce ‘marketable commodities’, set against her own passionate desire to make art and take risks, there is also a glorious exploration of food, sex, friendship, loss, feminism, art and religion. This intimate memoir feels like being in a café with Michèle, enjoying a glass of French wine and listening to her being funny, irreverent and political, passionate and indiscreet, (although this artlessness, the creation of such a natural-sounding voice is of course the skill of an accomplished writer who makes it look easy).

In one chapter, reading Roberts on rejecting the idea that the male gaze creates desire, I was struck by how powerfully her thinking had influenced me in my twenties. The idea of the radical nature of actively desiring, feeling desire as a woman and not just wanting to be desired, reflected back at twice your natural sexiness is a theme that comes up in my novels a lot. Since I was reading Michèle Roberts in the 1980s at the start of my writing life, I am aware of how much I owe her.

‘Negative capability’ she reminds us, is a term Keats used in a letter to a friend, meaning ‘to be capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’ Dwelling in the not-knowing, not being able, is of course so much easier to talk about, preach, than to actually practise. Might the concept be extended not just to writing but to living? Perhaps it could more broadly refer to all situations where a person felt out of control, even to ‘not being published, not being read’?

‘Just treading water, swimming, just lying on my back, floating in the present, the buoyant present holding me up and rocking me’, she suggests.

If you want to be buoyed up, nourished, encouraged to be fully alive, to challenge and to doubt, this memoir is a joy from start to finish.

Negative Capability is published by Sandstone Press.

Guest post by Patricia Elliott - THE CRIME WRITER by Jill Dawson

"Dawson's style is lyrical, particularly in her description, and immensely sympathetic to her complex, obsessive protagonist."

Patricia Elliott is the author of nine novels for children and young adults. She was lucky enough to win the Fidler Award for her first, The Ice Boy, and since then has been short-listed for many other awards (however, to date, never again winning first prize!) She has written in most genres – fantasy, historical, mystery -  but settings are particularly important to her and Suffolk, where she lives, has featured in several of her novels, including her Victorian Gothic YA, The Devil in the Corner. Her last two novels were Middle Grade mysteries set in the Edwardian period and featuring twelve-year old would-be anthropologist, Connie Carew: The House of Eyes and The Ship of Spectres. She is currently writing a fantasy set on the Suffolk coast. 

Patricia Highsmith, whom Graham Greene called 'the poet of apprehension', is the protagonist of this clever, beautifully written novel, a successful combination of fact and fiction that is sometimes blackly comic yet always gripping. Jill Dawson has imagined Highsmith as the protagonist in her own murder story, and, like the characters in her novels, suffering the same feelings of guilt and terror after the act.

I chose this novel to review because as a young teenager I was mesmerised by Patricia Highsmith's novels. Gloriously dark and menacing, with protagonists that seemed trapped in tragedies that had befallen them through one bad move that then led on, inexorably, to a chain of events they were almost helpless to avoid and yet, in a strange, inexplicable way, encouraged, as if they were playing a mad game, struck a resonance with me. At that age I had decided you could not escape Fate. It lay in wait for you and probably not in a good way, but it was fun to tempt it and see what happened.

The Crime Writer is set in Suffolk, where I live now, not far from the village of Earl Soham where Patricia Highsmith, then in her early forties, came for a period in 1964. She also walked the streets of Aldeburgh, which I know well, with her close friend Ronald Blythe (author of the acclaimed Akenfield), and her irritable ghost roams still, I sense, brushing past the holiday crowds and up to the lonely, squat presence of the Martello tower brooding over the cold North Sea, where this novel ends.

But back to the beginning.

Patricia Highsmith chose the village of Earl Soham, a 'dull, pleasant place' in the middle of nowhere, precisely for its 'anonymity'. She hoped to escape the trying newspaper reporters who wanted to write about her as an award-winning American crime writer, a label Pat (as she was known) despised. As she would patiently explain, there was little detection or description of police procedure in her books. She preferred them to be seen as suspense novels. It is true that the murders in her novels are less significant than the pursuit afterwards and the guilt suffered by the murderer: the chase and punishment rather than the crime itself. Her sympathy – and thus the reader's – is for the murderer rather than the victim. The murders are often committed with little thought, as if the actual motive comes after the deed is done. 'What interests me most is what goes on in the mind of someone who has killed somebody,' she said. 'Perversion is... my guiding darkness.'

In Earl Soham Pat believed she would find the peace to work on both her new novel and a commissioned non-fiction book on suspense writing. The village was also within relatively easy reach of London and her lover, Sam, the unhappily married wife of the repulsive (to Pat) Gerald. Beautiful Sam, tall, poised, elegant, would visit her for romantic weekends when they would celebrate their secret love in complete privacy.

But in The Crime Writer things do not go as Pat hopes. Hurried calls in the chilly phone box opposite her dank little cottage do not bring Sam as often as Pat desires. Always paranoid about being stalked she becomes convinced someone is following her, perhaps the same person who sends her letters that she leaves unopened. Hallucinations of a grotesque little man and the darting shadow of a mouse haunt her, as well as memories of her troubled, sometimes abusive, childhood. A heavy drinker and smoker, socially awkward, spiky, Pat is a passionate collector of snails, who likes to observe them mating on her window sill (and, indeed, shares some of the creatures' characteristics). Alone, she luxuriates in dark imaginings of committing murder. Those she knows - unloved, even loved - are the victims in her fantasies. Only her dear friend Ronnie (Blythe), always equable and kind, who does not judge her, can lift Pat's moods, though his 'sense of glowing health and cheer' can be exasperating.

Meanwhile, there is the boisterous, puppyish Ginny Smythson-Balby, with her bosoms like 'two juggernauts', seemingly yet another journalist but whose extravagant charms are impossible to resist...

Jill Dawson writes from Pat's point of view, whether in the third person or the first, and which she chooses to use when significant. She completely convinces us that it is Pat's thoughts to which we are privy, though in the first person sections she makes no attempt to pastiche Highsmith's style. Highsmith's was spare, cool, relentless, with an overriding sense of dread; she spent little time on setting. Dawson's style is lyrical, particularly in her description, and immensely sympathetic to her complex, obsessive protagonist, as Pat becomes more and more unable to distinguish between what is real and what is in her head. As in Highsmith's novels, the 'murder' happens early in The Crime Writer; followed by reflection, guilt and the ghastly chain of repercussions, which culminate in another 'murder'. Some of this reflects the plot of A Suspension of Mercy, the novel Pat was writing at the time, set in Suffolk, about a man who fantasises about killing his wife, but Dawson has also used details from other Highsmith novels, in particular Strangers on a Train and Deep Water. Sam herself is modelled on the beautiful, sophisticated lover in The Price of Salt (filmed recently as Carol).

The period detail is excellent: clothes, perfume, the items sold in the village store, the smell inside the phone box, the toiletries in Sam's bathroom, sixties' pubs. And of course the novel is about a writer and includes many insights into what goes on in a writer's mind. As Pat remarks to Ronnie, 'Who isn't to say that the life of the imagination isn't the most valid, the most real...' Something perhaps all writers have felt at times.

The Crime Writer is published by Sceptre.