The Birds Fall Down
by Rebecca West
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HTML:A "compelling . . . oddly intriguing" psychological thriller set in fin-de-siècle Paris from the New York Times–bestselling author of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (The New York Times). During early revolutionary stirrings in Russia, after an unexpected turn of events, Laura Rowan, the coddled granddaughter of an exiled British nobleman, becomes her grandfather's sole companion on a fateful train ride. In France, a young revolutionary approaches Laura and her grandfather with show more information that will turn her world upside down, and their travels become a thrilling journey into the heart of the struggle against Tsarist Russia. In this suspenseful novel, West brings to life a battle between entitled imperials and the passionate, savvy communist revolutionaries who dare to face them. Literature. Fiction. show lessTags
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Set in Europe during the early 1900s, Rebecca West’s story of Russian exiles and terrorist revolutionaries is told from the viewpoint of an eighteen-year old woman, who while strong and astute, suffers from the naiveté of having lived a protected and privileged life. Her father is an English Member of Parliament and an aloof, distant parent and her mother the indulged daughter of exiled Russian nobility. While visiting in Paris, she makes a trip with her grandfather, an imposing and deeply religious Russian Orthodox who remains fiercely loyal to his homeland and to the Tsar who has exiled him. They are approached on the train by a member of a Russian revolutionary terrorist group, from whom they learn the identity of an “agent show more provocateur” who plans terrorist attacks, then informs on his comrades to the Tsar’s secret police. Knowing this individual to be a close associate of her grandparents and fearing for her life, the young woman is drawn into acting as an accomplice to an assassination plan.
The Birds Fall Down, was Rebecca West’s last work of fiction published during her lifetime. In the book’s foreword, West describes the story as being based on an actual historical incident and most of her characters as actual involved persons. While West does not reveal their identities or her sources, it is widely assumed that the novel was inspired by the activities of Yevno Azef, a Russian double agent who worked both for the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Tsar’s Imperial Secret Police.
West’s characters are splendidly developed and her writing richly detailed and atmospheric, capturing the tradition-steeped lifestyle of Orthodox Russian exiles of privilege. While incorporating elements of psychological thriller, historical fiction, mystery and spy novel, this book in the end defies simple classification. West skillfully builds suspense throughout the story, but the ending lacks the unexpected and the reader is left with only the slightest of unresolved questions. The novel’s effectiveness as historical fiction is also limited, as only vague hints are provided of the significance of its events, explained in the foreword as paving the way for Lenin’s rise to power by undermining the terrorist wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In my opinion, this novel succeeds best as a psychological thriller and portrait of an ideology and way of life lost to time, revolution and war. It was a pleasure to read, its details to be savored, and has left me interested in seeking other works by this author. show less
The Birds Fall Down, was Rebecca West’s last work of fiction published during her lifetime. In the book’s foreword, West describes the story as being based on an actual historical incident and most of her characters as actual involved persons. While West does not reveal their identities or her sources, it is widely assumed that the novel was inspired by the activities of Yevno Azef, a Russian double agent who worked both for the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Tsar’s Imperial Secret Police.
West’s characters are splendidly developed and her writing richly detailed and atmospheric, capturing the tradition-steeped lifestyle of Orthodox Russian exiles of privilege. While incorporating elements of psychological thriller, historical fiction, mystery and spy novel, this book in the end defies simple classification. West skillfully builds suspense throughout the story, but the ending lacks the unexpected and the reader is left with only the slightest of unresolved questions. The novel’s effectiveness as historical fiction is also limited, as only vague hints are provided of the significance of its events, explained in the foreword as paving the way for Lenin’s rise to power by undermining the terrorist wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In my opinion, this novel succeeds best as a psychological thriller and portrait of an ideology and way of life lost to time, revolution and war. It was a pleasure to read, its details to be savored, and has left me interested in seeking other works by this author. show less
In the early years of the 20th century, Laura is taken to Paris to visit her maternal grandparents; her grandmother is ill and her grandfather preoccupied by his exile from Russia, his unwavering loyalty to the Tsar, and need to find a way to clear his name. On a train journey she and her grandfather are taking to visit other relatives and allow her mother to look after her grandfather in peace, a man enters their compartment and proceeds to start a long conversation in the course of which the identity of a double agent in the revolutionary circles and the lawful establishment becomes clear, and it hits a bit closer to home than anyone in the compartment might have guessed. Laura's grandfather is very shaken, and she herself becomes show more very conscious of the position she finds herself as one who knows of the betrayal, wanting to protect the man who revealed it and frightened of the very real possibility that the double agent will seek to eliminate her too now that she knows. show less
Cited in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006 edition), Rebecca West's novel The Birds Fall Down (1966) was her last novel published during her lifetime. Four of these are listed in 1001 Books, each of which (even without considering her nonfiction output such as A Train of Powder (1955, see my review) demonstrates her versatility as an author :
This is part of the 1001 Books citation:
Rebecca West was in her seventies when The Birds Fall Down was published, so she was writing with the weight of 20th century history at her back but in 1966 with the triumphs of the USSR yet to falter, and yet she manages to transport her readers back to the earliest years of that century, just after the end of the Boer War (1899-1902). Her characters are yet to experience climactic events such as WW1 and the Russian October Revolution in 1917 but the most extraordinary achievement of the novel is the voice of 18-year-old Laura. Separated from our time by over a century, Laura's voice seems authentic in every way. She knows more about the turmoil in Russia than most readers would today because her aristocratic grandfather has been exiled because of a presumed association with revolutionaries... but she's eighteen. All that drama is far away from where he now (very comfortably) lives in Paris, and even further from England where she lives a privileged life with her English father and Russian mother. She's a bit 'over it', as we say today.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2026/06/12/the-birds-fall-down-1966-by-rebecca-west/ show less
- The Return of the Soldier (1918, see my review)
- Harriet Hume (1929)
- The Thinking Reed (1936, see my review)
- The Birds Fall Down (1966)
This is part of the 1001 Books citation:
The story of the unwitting involvement of eighteen-year-old Laura Rowan in the events leaning up to the Russian Revolution, The Birds Fall Down is part historical novel, part political thriller, and part acuteshow more
psychological character study. Taking place over only a few days, the novel focuses on Laura's sudden emergence into the middle of a political conspiracy. West follows with forensic care the delicate modulations in Laura's response to the discovery that her exiled Russian grandfather is surrounded by spies and double agents who are intent on killing them both. Despite this intense and narrow focus on Laura' psychological response to trauma, the novel has a vast historical range. (1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, edited by Peter Boxall, 2006 edition, p 582.)
Rebecca West was in her seventies when The Birds Fall Down was published, so she was writing with the weight of 20th century history at her back but in 1966 with the triumphs of the USSR yet to falter, and yet she manages to transport her readers back to the earliest years of that century, just after the end of the Boer War (1899-1902). Her characters are yet to experience climactic events such as WW1 and the Russian October Revolution in 1917 but the most extraordinary achievement of the novel is the voice of 18-year-old Laura. Separated from our time by over a century, Laura's voice seems authentic in every way. She knows more about the turmoil in Russia than most readers would today because her aristocratic grandfather has been exiled because of a presumed association with revolutionaries... but she's eighteen. All that drama is far away from where he now (very comfortably) lives in Paris, and even further from England where she lives a privileged life with her English father and Russian mother. She's a bit 'over it', as we say today.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2026/06/12/the-birds-fall-down-1966-by-rebecca-west/ show less
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ThingScore 75
The early section of "The Birds Fall Down" doesn't exactly ease one's forebodings. . . But don't underestimate Dame Rebecca. The moment old Diakonov has left the house, an oddly intriguing note creeps into his garrulity. . . . I fault the story only for permitting itself too many undelirious figures. . . But ultimately Dame Rebecca comes through like her own best characters. Her follies as a show more writer only set off her virtues. show less
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Author Information
48+ Works 8,578 Members
Taking her name from one of Henrik Ibsen's strong-minded women, Rebecca West was a politically and socially active feminist all her long life. She had an intense 10-year affair with H.G. Wells, with whom she had a son. A brilliant and versatile novelist, critic, essayist, and political commentator, West's greatest literary achievement is perhaps show more her travel diary, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (1942). Five years in the writing, it is the story of an Easter trip that she and her husband, British banker Henry Maxwell Andrews (whom she had married in 1930), made through Yugoslavia in 1937. A historical narrative with excellent reporting, it is essentially an analysis of Western culture. During World War II, she superintended British broadcast talks to Yugoslavia. Her remarkable reports of the treason trials of Lord Haw and John Amery appeared first in the New Yorker and are included with other stories about traitors in The Meaning of Treason (1947), which was expanded to deal with traitors and defectors since World War II as The New Meaning of Treason (1964). The Birds Fall Down (1966), which was a bestseller, is the story of a young Englishwoman caught in the grip of Russian terrorists. From a true story told to her more than half a century ago by the sister of Ford Madox Ford (who had heard it from her Russian husband), West "created a rich and instructive spy thriller, which contains an immense amount of brilliantly distributed information about the ideologies of the time, the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, the conflicts of customs, belief, and temperament between Russians and Western Europeans, the techniques of espionage and counter-espionage, and the life of exiles in Paris" (New Yorker). Unlike that of her more famous contemporaries, her fiction is stylistically and structurally conventional, but it effectively details the evolution of daily life amid the backdrop of such historical disasters as the world wars. Her critical works include Arnold Bennett Himself, Henry James (1916), Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews, and The Court and the Castle (1957), a study of political and religious ideas in imaginative literature. In 1949, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Birds Fall Down
- Alternate titles*
- De vogelvrijen
- Original publication date
- 1966
- People/Characters
- Laura Rowan; Nikolai Diakonov; Vassili Chubinov; Alexander Kamensky; Edward Rowan; Tania Rowan (show all 7); Madame Verrier
- Important places
- Paris, France
- Related movies
- The Birds Fall Down (1978 | TV | IMDb)
- Epigraph
- We are all bowmen in this place.
The pattern of the birds against the sky
Our arrows overprint, and then they die.
But it is also common to our race
That when the birds fall down we weep.
Reason’s a thing we ... (show all)dimly see in sleep.
CONWAY POWER: Guide to a Disturbed Planet - Dedication
- TO MILAN & LELA GAVRILOVITCH
whom I love and honour - First words
- One afternoon, in an early summer of this century, when Laura Rowan was just eighteen she sat, embroidering a handkerchief, on the steps leading down from the terrace of her father's house to the gardens communally owned by t... (show all)he residents in Radnage Square. She liked embroidery.
The Birds Fall Down is first and foremost a mystery story; it is also a family story, a political thriller, and a philosophical drama. (Introduction)
This novel is founded on a historical event: perhaps the most momentous conversation ever to take place on a moving railway train. (Foreword) - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)There was a knock at the door, and they delayed only long enough to smile at each other, and to exchange a kiss.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I've read it a good many times - the last occasion, suitably enough, on a train between Moscow and the city that Laura and her grandfather called St. Petersburg - and each time it seems better, cleverer, more exciting, more moving. (Introduction)
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I would also like to send a word of thanks to the ghosts of Ford Madox Ford, and his sister, Juliet Soskice, wife of a Russian revolutionary who took refuge in England, and a pioneer translator of Russian literature, from whom I first heard the story which I transformed into this novel, so long ago that the leading participants were still alive. (Foreword) - Original language
- English
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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