Every tale shines in debut collection
I ’ ve been reviewing a lot of anthologies and collections recently and have developed a sort of pre- emptive bracing against the inevitable dud story in among the good ones. But by the time I finished Bird Country, the fall wasn’t coming — all these short stories are superb.
Bird Country has amassed a seriously impressive list of prizes, especially when you consider it is Claire Aman’s first book. The stories are separate, but linked by the motif of birds, and the setting of Grafton, a small rural town in New South Wales.
In the first story, Sailor’s Tale, the bird is a dead pigeon on the deck of a sailboat. A man, a woman and their son are heading for the sea to scatter the man’s father’s ashes. None of the characters are named and are instead referred to by their roles: the captain, the mate, the old man. ( Aman does this again in Sustenance: the poet, the painter, the candlestick maker).
Indeed, throughout Bird Country the protagonists are rarely named. It’s an odd trick that simultaneously distances the reader by slightly dehumanising the characters but brings us in closer by assuming we’re already too intimate to need to be told their names.
Jap Floral is the story that has stayed with me the most. A glassworker — a very creepy man — is standing on a balustrade above where his ex- wife is dining, holding a large piece of blue glass and considering dropping it on her: “Glass doesn’t forgive”. “I am not an intolerant man”, he says with total inaccuracy. “I love perfect resolution. I consider myself finely tuned.”
The unreliable narrator is one of my favourite literary conceits and in this story Aman invites us to view the events of the story through the distorted and coloured glass of the man’s perceptions. “When the light changes, everything is different. Why should you expect to see anything else but the truth?”
In Sustenance, Aman writes: “The poet sees the hugeness of things. She will distil and distil until she has a single shining drop.” This is also true of Bird Country itself, which packs huge themes — poverty, friendship, disability, abuse, death, family, addiction — into 16 excellent short stories.