Book: All the Little Bird-Hearts
Author: Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow
Published by: Hachette
Price: Rs 799
Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s Booker Prize-longlisted debut novel is a story of relationships — the relationship between the protagonist and her daughter; between a woman with her neighbour(s) and supposed friends; between the past and the present; and, most importantly, a neurodivergent person’s relationship with society and with herself. The protagonist, Sunday, is autistic; she finds it difficult to decipher social cues, is obsessed with Sicilian culture and folktales, and tries to live her life following the precepts laid down by one Edith Ogilvy in a 1959 conduct book titled Etiquette for Ladies. Sunday is also fascinated by the accents and the enunciations of other people and tries to imagine a backstory for them depending on the way they speak. Her teenaged daughter, Dolores (named after her dead sister) or Dolly, is often impatient with what she perceives to be her mother’s failings and prefers to be pampered by her father’s wealthy family. Sunday, however, likes the serenity and the beauty of her surroundings in the Lake District despite her traumatic memory of the death of her elder sister by dry drowning after swimming in the lake.
Sunday’s days, months, and years revolve around a routine that she has curated for herself. But things suddenly change when the house next to hers comes to be occupied one summer by a rich, childless couple — Vita and Rollo. The story opens three years after the summer the couple comes to reside in the house next to Sunday’s. The wealthy, charming, and socially adept Vita quickly becomes friendly, first with Sunday, then with Dolly. Friday dinners become a weekly ritual at their house; but Sunday cannot and does not partake of the rich feast laid out for them since she drinks only fizzy drinks and is in a recurrent phase of her life when she can only eat food that is white in colour. Dolly, however, finds the couple infinitely charming and drifts further away from her mother, to the extent that she virtually starts living at the house next door and, eventually, decides to move to London with them in spite of Sunday’s objections. Vita and Rollo almost have a touch of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy and Tom Buchanan (The Great Gatsby) in their casual disregard of other people’s feelings and their belief that the world should provide them with anything they want — in this case, a surrogate daughter in the form of Dolly.
Narrated in first-person from Sunday’s perspective, the language of the novel is bereft of any frills and, yet, is perfectly adequate to describe the protagonist’s feelings and thoughts. Interestingly, Sunday’s social awkwardness brings into sharp relief the social pretentions of the people within the small community she inhabits. The description of the annual party thrown by the Forresters, her former marital family, offers moments of exquisite social comedy as we see the guests and the hosts with all their affectations through the eyes of a protagonist who is incapable of such antics.
All the Little Bird-Hearts is often poignant in tone and content, but the sense of loss does not lie at the heart of the narrative. Sunday has lost much in life, but she has a zest for it. She loves her daughter but is not unaware of her self-centredness. Even after Dolly’s desertion of her mother and the latter’s marital family’s collusion in the act, Sunday can make peace with herself. After Dolly rejects the scope of the life her mother can offer her as “small”, Sunday realises “I did like my life, and I did not want to live like [Dolly], or like Vita, however easy they found it. Everything came effortlessly to them, and was therefore replaceable and without value.” Eventually, Vita and Rollo do replace Dolly with others. That Dolly has come to understand her mother a bit better is hinted at the conclusion of the novel, which not only ends on a note of hope but also affirms the value of life and relationships.
The fact that Lloyd-Barlow herself is autistic might have impacted the subtle and exquisite portrayal of a neurodivergent character. Her story-telling holds immense promise and readers might expect greater things to come from her.
