CBR14 BINGO: Bird square
(Full disclosure: this book is not about birds. In my defense of this square filler, the book’s blurb mentions orange-bellied parrots. Parrots do appear in the story, albeit briefly, and I’m counting it because I had to read this book and I want credit for it.)
Did you ever read a book that you knew would be considered a masterpiece by a lot of people, could even understand why people would think that and still find the reading of it not worth your time? How do you review that? “I’m sure greater students of literature will find this relevant but me? Not so much.” Maybe a better approach would be: “If you like a stream of consciousness, complete lack of commas, and poetic passages about feeding tubes, this book is for you.”
There is a lot to unpack here but highlights include environmental collapse, medical advancements vs quality of life, drug addiction, pedophile priests, and mental illness. It’s a grab bag of our worst headlines offered almost like a social media post. It’s a “look at me!” laundry list of our most egregious behaviors delivered in a super detached voice. I’m sure that is part of the whole point, but funneling all of that ugliness through an unreliable, self-absorbed narrator’s internal dialogue was not engaging.
Mostly, it’s a story about three siblings whose mother is dying. When confronted with the decline of their mother’s health, the 2 “successful” siblings kick into overachiever drive and refuse to admit defeat. They throw money and privilege at the “problem” to keep their mother alive regardless of medical opinion or her wishes. The artistic and “less successful” sibling, who had been their mother’s caretaker until she was hospitalized, is bullied into an agreement. All of this is backdropped by the 2019/2020 bushfires that raged through Australia. The decline of their mother is juxtaposed to the decline of the environment and the inevitable extinction of the orange-bellied parrots (See! Birds! I told you I’d make it work) whose difficult yearly breeding migration from mainland Australia to the remotest area of Tasmania is further complicated by the wall of smoke they now have to fly through.
The overriding theme is disappearing and the thematic hammer hits often: disappearing into our screens, wildlife becoming extinct, an environment being devoured by its own climate. There is also some magical realism shoehorned in regarding disappearing that was an unnecessary overreach. Honestly, I don’t even want to get into it here. The aforementioned thematic hammer was enough for me.