Birding

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Longlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize, Birding is Rose Ruane's second novel after This is Yesterday (2019), and although it has an important story to tell, it is rather grim reading. All of us, one way or another, have had some kind of #MeToo experiences of greater and lesser severity, and have dealt with it then or later in various ways. But Rose Ruane's novel features a character exploited and degraded as a one-hit-wonder teen pop star, and now in her forties is a psychological wreck, made worse by renewed contact with her abuser. I don't think books should come with trigger warnings, but I found show more Lydia's tortured narrative painful to read... not because it's graphic, because it's not, but because of her self-blame and inability to take any pleasure in life because she can't get the man out of her head. I hesitate to recommend this novel to anyone who still has issues that are troubling them because it is harrowing reading and there is suicidal ideation and self-harm.

The setting is grim too. Awful weather matches the mood of the novel. Lydia has fled London to stay with her friend and fellow pop star in one of those dreary seaside towns that are past their use-by date. Pandora is an entrepreneur who seems to have emerged from their shared experiences unscathed and is increasingly irritated by Lydia's preoccupation with the past. Renovating a dingy hotel to suit her ambitions for the town as The Next Big Thing, Pan is busy and purposeful and impatient with people who don't want to have a good time — and that includes her daughter Laurence (Lol) who is deeply troubled by identity issues.

As if all that were not enough, then there is the story of Joyce. This is how her situation is described in the blurb:

Joyce, in middle age, has never left home. She still lives with her mother Betty. With their matching dresses, identical hairdos and makeup, they are the local oddballs. Theirs is a life of unerring routine: the shops, biscuits served on bone china plates, dressing up for a gin and tonic on Saturday. Nice things. One misstep from Joyce can ruin Betty's day; so Joyce treads carefully. She has never let herself think about a different kind of life. But recently, along with the hot flushes, something like anger is asserting itself, like a caged thing realising it should probably try and escape.

That description is no preparation for the relentless bullying that Betty inflicts on Joyce. It goes on and on, page after page, chapter after chapter, until the reader feels as browbeaten and trapped as Joyce is. At the end of each dreary chapter about poor Lydia's sorrows, I wanted to put the book aside because I knew that the next alternating chapter would be Betty's tyranny again. I can't imagine how ghastly this would be when rendered in an audiobook.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/03/14/birding-2024-by-rose-ruane/ show less