The Birds of the Air

by Alice Thomas Ellis

Book Overview

A family gather together for Christmas. Each member of the group has an inner longing of some sort - Mary pines for death, Barbara pines for love and the children pine for understanding. Soon, the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140067353
• ISBN13: 9780140067354
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Penguin Group (Canada)
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.3" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

"I feel like a great white vegetable."

It is Christmas-time, and Mary Marsh is spending all her time sitting in a windowseat, staring out at the quarreling birds while those around her prepare for the holidays. Shattered by the death of her young son Robin, she is living in her mother's house after suffering a complete breakdown. Surrounded by well-meaning but dense people who want to "snap her out of it," Mary sees herself as Iphigenia, a woman willing to be a sacrifice if she can only escape the world and rejoin Robin. Mrs. Marsh sees her, by contrast, as something resembling "a toad's tummy." Despite the mordant tone and the genuine sadness one feels for Mary, Ellis has managed to write a tragicomedy that contains at least as much comedy, much of it satiric, as it does tragedy. Mary's mother, the doughty Mrs. Marsh, regards herself as "the keeper of the cage," seeing her daughter as "the bird [that] had come back, if only to die," but she believes her own grief compares to that of Mary, since "she permitted herself to weep a little each morning in the bathroom before she put on her eyeshadow." Other family members also arrive with their baggage of problems. Barbara, Mary's sister, is the hard-working wife of Sebastian, an academic, and in a hilariously described party which Barbara holds for her husband's colleagues, Ellis skewers the pretensions and one-upsmanship of academia while revealing Seb's infidelity with a woman nicknamed (in keeping with the bird imagery) "The Thrush." Various neighbors and friends arrive at the Marsh household for the holiday dinner, and the predictable chaos and thwarted expectations result.As is always the case with Ellis, every page contains some marvel of observation, pithy remark, or unique description about people and their attitudes. Sebastian, the academic, has dedicated his life to the proposition that words should be used "with tremendous care..that anyone who couldn't say exactly what he meant should keep his trap shut." Mrs. Marsh, however, "liked the human comfort of the cliché." Barbara suffers from "grasping, tentacular nervousness." One of the grandchildren "had an ego like the liver of a Strasbourg goose," and another character has a head that "looked as if it had been lightly buttered." Dialogue is sparkling and crafted to reveal character, as Ellis's droll, ascerbic wit turns an essentially sad story into a black comedy of misread cues, with elements of Welsh myth and fantasy serving as counterpoint to the symbolism of Christmas and the realities of life. Polished, provocative, and deliciously dark, this novel is one of Ellis's best. Mary Whipple