Bird's-eye view

Booker longlisted Anna Smaill’s second novel explores the gaps between the reality we build for ourselves and who we really are.

- SALLY BLUNDELL

In a park in Tokyo, a young man in a cheap black suit props one side of a plastic crate on to a stick to which a string is tied. Leading to the crate is a trail of hamburger bun crumbs. He sits back. He waits. The bird trap is a failure. The pigeons ignore the bread. A group of women laugh behind their hands.

The slow-paced, staccato opening to Bird Life, the new novel from Wellington writer Anna Smaill, has a palpable tension that permeates this tale of grief, friendship and madness. The crate clatters to the ground, the pigeons take to the sky, the fountain suddenly erupts, an immaculately dressed middle-aged woman walks, one shoe held in her hand, towards a young foreign woman lying eyes-closed on the grass.

If Bird Life were a film, the theatre would already be gripped. Dinah, the young woman in the park, has recently arrived from Oamaru to teach English at Saitama Denki University. She is mourning the death of her twin brother, Michael, a brilliant pianist whose future was cut short through mental illness. As he explained to his sister, "Something down deep in the hammers and wires. Nothing you could do.

You would have had to take the whole thing apart to fix it." Yasuko, the middle-aged woman, is a teacher at the same institution. Her beloved son, Jun, has left home, whereabouts unknown. Dinah and Yasuko offer each other a way through their grief that is reassuring and potentially perilous.