Freedom, equality central to theme
The struggles of a key female character make this novel a compulsive read for Paula Green.
Helen Dunmore, a British novelist, children’s author and poet, received the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction (now The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction) for A Spell of Winter. Her latest novel, Birdcage Walk ,isa terrific read: fearless, poignant, challenging.
Set in 1792, when Europe is besieged with turmoil and violence and the French Revolution is unfolding, Dunmore centres her story in Bristol. There is something curiously illuminating about shifting from the centre stage of significant historical events to the people who act as longdistance witnesses and who are participants in the fallout rather than the central action.
Bristol’s housing boom collapses when Britain and France declare war and hundreds of houses are left incomplete. Pockets of idealists in Radical circles write and debate notions inspired by French thought and actions.
Lizzie Fawkes is raised in a Radical family, by a freethinking and articulate mother who writes deep in the night after she has made sure her husband has everything he needs. Lizzie marries a property developer who views his new wife as his property, who cannot abide the opinions she brings and who hides his own dark secrets.
The first few chapters fell slightly flat, as though I was viewing the fictionalised world through the wrong end of a telescope, but when Lizzie’s mother gives birth to a baby, everything changed. Now the key characters pulse with life: with sweat, pain, hunger, dread, love, filth, blood, misunderstandings, the need to survive. I could not stop reading. The events in France are relayed through letters, newspapers and hearsay, and the families struggle to agree on the truth of the matter. Debts are rising and pantries are nigh empty. Lizzie works her fingers to the bone trying to appease and feed her husband, and to maintain a necessary closeness to her family. She is on the brink of collapse.
Lizzie is what makes this book compulsive for me. She meets a poet on the run who wants to escape with her to remote Scotland, regardless of her marital status, regardless of the fact he will write sonnets while she stirs the pots. In the midst of political turmoil, when ordinary people are striving to secure freedom and equality for all, Lizzie is desperate to understand how freedom and equality work for an individual woman. She loves her husband, she cannot leave him, yet her sense of self is adrift in the clouds.
Equally fascinating is the way concepts such as freedom and equality continue to be both essential and elusive in our contemporary world. The novel also reminded me that, while women have achieved so much, Lizzie’s struggles resonate beyond Dunmore’s historical context.