FEATHERHOOD
CHARLIE GILMOUR W&N, 288pp, £16.99, ebook £8.99
Gilmour himself, in the Observer, explained his struggle to understand the father – Heathcote Williams – who abandoned him as baby: ‘I thought I would never solve the riddle of the man, never find out why he flew from fatherhood...
‘From a distance, Heathcote – conjuror, poet, anarchist – seemed like a man possessed of powerful magic... but I knew him as a jumble of secondhand stories and images. The year [he] died, I began writing [this] book of my own, a memoir about an abandoned magpie. While caring for the magpie, I made an unexpected discovery. Heathcote, too, had an intense bond with a wild bird – a jackdaw that lived with him not long before he met my mum.’
In the Evening Standard David Marsland said, ‘There is much that will forever bind the two [men]. Not least, the eerie coincidence that both rear wild birds... Benzene, Gilmour’s bird, is a chick rescued by his future wife and her sister. Reluctantly taking over its care, Gilmour finds this proxy-baby gives his shambolic days a purpose. Featherhood is an incisive, funny and at times traumatic study of the damage done by destructive father-son relationships.
Helen Davies wrote in the Sunday Times, ‘[Gilmour] attempts to piece together his relationship with Williams... The result is a sincere and searing tale of loss, addictive despair, the redemptive power of love, the natural world and a shit-dropping, feather-moulting, talking magpie.’