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A review by readerstephen86
The Birds on the Trees by Nina Bawden
3.0
SUMMARY - Another chilly-hearted glimpse into middle-class life that deals with counterculture and antipsychiatry. It's more clinical than empathetic, though, and its the class hangups that feel most real.
A book written in a similar vein to some other Booker Prize-shortlisted novels of the early 1970s. Like others by Bernice Reubens and Dorris Lessing, Bawden explores mental illness through the filter of anti-psychiatric questioning on how far family life and social conformity are themselves the sickness, rather than the 'free' subjects they seek to label.
I especially enjoyed Lessing's more experimental 'Briefing for a Decent into Hell', but Bowden here gives us a much more conventional domestic and neighbourly tale of a dysfunctional family. The character who is diagnosed in the novel (without giving too much away) seeks to escape the expectations of others. In contrast those who do the labelling are often shown to be hypocrites, cold, or self-serving.
There is cuttingly cold middle-class dialogue, which seems to be another feature of several early 1970s Booker nominees. The Sunday dinner scene where the aunt is savaged but they still sit and eat felt more overdone than the vegetables they were no doubt eating at the time. Why didn't she leave? It made a point about the unhealthiness of 'respectable' middle class modes of behaviour within the plot, but I found it harder to believe. By the end none of the characters are endearing, which makes it harder to care about the action. Occasionally (cf Iris Murdoch) I have read books where we are meant to dislike the character, but I've still enjoyed the book. That's hard to pull off, and Bowden for me only got part of the way there. I was diverted but not fully won-over.
A book written in a similar vein to some other Booker Prize-shortlisted novels of the early 1970s. Like others by Bernice Reubens and Dorris Lessing, Bawden explores mental illness through the filter of anti-psychiatric questioning on how far family life and social conformity are themselves the sickness, rather than the 'free' subjects they seek to label.
I especially enjoyed Lessing's more experimental 'Briefing for a Decent into Hell', but Bowden here gives us a much more conventional domestic and neighbourly tale of a dysfunctional family. The character who is diagnosed in the novel (without giving too much away) seeks to escape the expectations of others. In contrast those who do the labelling are often shown to be hypocrites, cold, or self-serving.
There is cuttingly cold middle-class dialogue, which seems to be another feature of several early 1970s Booker nominees. The Sunday dinner scene where the aunt is savaged but they still sit and eat felt more overdone than the vegetables they were no doubt eating at the time. Why didn't she leave? It made a point about the unhealthiness of 'respectable' middle class modes of behaviour within the plot, but I found it harder to believe. By the end none of the characters are endearing, which makes it harder to care about the action. Occasionally (cf Iris Murdoch) I have read books where we are meant to dislike the character, but I've still enjoyed the book. That's hard to pull off, and Bowden for me only got part of the way there. I was diverted but not fully won-over.