Book Review: Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter

 Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter

Read: 10/11/2023

My rating: 4 /5 stars

Book of 2023: 15

Once upon a time there was a crow who wanted nothing more than to care for a pair of motherless children…

In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother’s sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. 

In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. 

This extraordinary debut, full of unexpected humour and emotional truth, marks the arrival of a thrilling and significant new talent. 

I stumbled across this book at the Arnolfini in Bristol, where I’d honestly ducked in to shelter from the rain on a cosy weekend spent making my bullet journal spreads and writing my letter to 24. I hid from the rain and wandered along the shelves. I ended up spending a long time there (go figure) and found this little gem. I read the first page and was immediately hooked. I also decided now was a good time to read a book about grief. You know, just in case. 

I picked this up to begin on the train up to Manchester to see Josh and watch Rhys James on tour. It ended up being the day my Dad went in for his first round of chemo. A heavy day! In typical fashion I ended up crying on the train - part of it stood in the aisle since it was so packed. I didn’t even notice half of the standing, since I became so engrossed in the way Porter writes. 

The book feels “experimental” in style. We’re not provided a full picture, an entire backstory, but instead lines and emotions and thoughts in fragments, for us to piece together. The father, the crow, and the boys weave their tales throughout. This fragmented narrative reflects the way grief leaves you bare, confused, out of sorts, blurring between real life and memories. 

Aided by the title, we know the crow is “the thing with feathers”. Grief is the crow, the crow being the symbol of grief, appearing suddenly, unwanted, there with you, spikey, unsanitary, uncomfortable, unlikable, and constant. But the crow is also the creature in the story who helps the family to build on top of their grief, making the grief no longer their entire identity, the grief part of them, not all of them. The crow is there for them, a surrogate mother, a surrogate father, a surrogate light in their world. 

Throughout, there is a beautiful love story. A real one, a heartfelt one, one with bones and flesh and then dust and air. A story of how a husband loves a wife and how a husband becomes a father, and how at the disappearance of his wife, a husband can cease to be a father. Struggles without his partner. Struggles to love them when he’s lost her. The boys have lost their mother, their carer. The crow flies in, a wife, a mother, someone to pin their grief to, to hold themselves accountable. 

It’s about missing the best of a person and missing the worst, missing the good times and missing the bad. The arguments, the kisses, the laughter, the bickering. Missing your mother’s care, and all the things she did and realising things are different now and all of the things you’ll do she won’t be there for. 

It is truly a beautiful exploration of love, pain, loss, forgiveness, despair, hope, fellowship, family. 

Lines I highlighted:

PART ONE - A LICK OF NIGHT

Dinner party post-mortem bitches with kind intentions. (5)

I won’t leave until you don’t need me anymore. (7)

The whole place was heavy mourning, every surface dead Mum, every crayon, tractor, coat, welly, covered in a film of grief. (9)

He woke up and didn’t see me against the blackness of his trauma. (10)

We guessed and understood that this was a new life and Dad was a new type of Dad now and we were different boys, we were brave new boys without a Mum. (13)

Where is the noise and clamour of an event like this? (13)

What good is a crow to a pack of grieving humans? (15)

All the fun was sucked across the wide empty beach. I felt sick and my brother swore. (19)

We will never fight again. (20)

She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone. (20)

I will stop finding her hairs. I will stop hearing her breathing. (20)

PART TWO - DEFENCE OF THE NEST

She told us that men were rarely truly kind, but they were often funny, which is better. (33)

I wanted to be there again. Again and again. I want to be held, I wanted to hold. (35)

I remember being scared that something, must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes. (39)

We are fifty feet out to sea being chewed apart by sadness. (41)

We did these things to miss her, to keep wanting her. (49)

The father, drunk on the voice of his beloved, raced down after them. The sound of her voice was stinging, like a moon-dragged starvation surging into every hopeless raw vacant pore, undoing, exquisite undoing. (55-6)

But I am a crow and we can do many things in the dark, even play at Mommy (64)

There is a beautiful lazy swagger to tired little men, they roll and flump and crash down in the interlude before beginning to scavenge for food or entertainment, and I was always filled with uncharacteristic optimism and good cheer watching them slouch unselfconsciously back into their roost. (64-5)

Once upon a time there were two boys who purposefully misremembered things about their father. It made them feel better if ever they forgot things about their mother. (71)

Their mother had gone - she had either lain down in the snow and slept to death or been taken by wolves (73)

He was reading Osip Mandelstam and underlining and folding pages, copying bits into his notebook. (82)

We abused him and mocked him because it seemed to remind him of our Mum. (91)

We all felt, the three of us, that without her things didn’t work as they should. (92)

I walked around the flat as if I’d only just met it, long strides and over-determined checking of surfaces. (95)

We were careful to age her, never trap her. Careful to name her Granny, when Dad became Grandpa.

We hope she likes us. (96)

Don’t worry about doing stuff or not doing stuff, it doesn’t matter. (97)

Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. (99)

Do you want me to MOVE ON?

Should we think about MOVING ON?

No, I said, I agree, we are doing just fine. (100-101)

Grieving is something you’re still doing, and something you don’t need a crow for. (103)

Their two smells became one smell, our smell. Us. (105)

Connoisseurs, they were, of how to miss a mother. (110)

The ashes stirred and seemed eager so I tilted the tin and I yelled into the wind

I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU. (114)

And the boys were behind me, a tide-wall of laughter and yelling, hugging my legs, tripping and grabbing, leaping, spinning, stumbling, roaring, shrieking and the boys shouted

I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU

And their voice was the life and song of their mother. Unfinished. Beautiful. Everything. (114)