The Birdcage (by Marcia Willett)

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I am so enjoying re-reading my novels by Marcia Willett. I don’t know why I didn’t start doing so years ago. She creates the most delightful, three dimensional people and her novels are full of interesting storylines.  I’ve just finished re-reading ‘The Birdcage’, which I haven’t read since shortly after I was given it in 2006. I loved it, and this time around I could hardly put it down once I had started.

The advantage of not having read a book for fourteen years, of course, is that I had entirely forgotten the plot and the people concerned. The main protagonist of this novel is Lizzie, who is in her late forties for the main part of the story. She is sorting through some boxes in her house, thinking about the past, and she comes across an old postcard. It’s of a village, with a cryptic message from her mother, and as she racks her brains to remember names and events, she starts wondering what happened to a large birdcage that used to hang over the piano.

It’s a dual time-zone story, set mainly in 1998, but with significant flashbacks and scenes from the past, mostly in 1956 when Lizzie was a child. Lizzie’s mother, known to everyone as Angel, was an actress and a single mother. They lived with a friend known to everyone as Pidge, but by 1998 they have both died.

Lizzie, who lives in Bristol, wishes she had asked them more questions about the past when she had the opportunity. So she makes the decision to go and stay in the village of Dunster, in Devon, where she can recall going on holiday with her mother, and where the postcard was sent from. She hopes she can find Felxi, the man who was her mother’s lover for some years, although she realises that he must be quite old and may also have died…

We actually meet Felix in the prologue of the book, set in the 1950s. He lives a double life, as is clear from the start, although Lizzie, at eight, doesn’t really understand. Felix’s wife is rather cold and possessive, while Angel is warm and welcoming. Felix only sees her once a month when he is on a business trip to Bristol, but it’s inevitable that something is going to break…

There are quite a few characters in this novel, which I found confusing at first. Felix, in 1956, has a young son called Piers who is about Lizzie’s age, and a father-in-law called David whom he likes very much. By 1998 Felix is elderly, Piers’s wife has left him, and he has a daughter-in-law called Tilda and a grandson called Jake. Piers’s son David, Tilda’s husband, died about a year before the 1998 part of the story starts, although we gradually learn more about him through the course of the book.

Piers’s childhood was fraught with tension, caught often between his jealous mother and his more relaxed father, unsure which of them really cared for him, and hating the arguments. I found the scenes involving his childhood very emotional, and felt so sorry for him, unsurprised that, in the 1998 section of the story, he and his father have quite a stressful relationship.

It’s a character-based book, and Marcia Willett creates believable, mostly likeable characters, memorable enough (on the whole) to be distinguishable. I did get a bit confused by some of the names of friends and relatives, and couldn’t always keep track of who was whom, but it didn’t much matter. I liked Lizzie enormously, and Tilda even more so.

Willett often uses characters from previous novels in scenes or incidents in later books, and this is no exception. A couple called Guy and Gemma come to visit, and I recalled them immediately from several of the earlier books by this author. I wondered at first why they were included, as their story seems at first to bear little relation to that of Lizzie and Piers and their families, other than Gemma’s brother being in love with Tilda. But it becomes clear, later in the book, when secrets from the past are brought to the fore.

If I have a slight gripe with this book, it’s that the tenses seem back to front, to me. The 1998 part of the book is written in the past tense, but the 1956 part - and other flashback scenes - are all in the present tense. It helps to distinguish which time period is which, but some of the present tense grammar feels a bit forced, and I’d have preferred it the other way around, with the past written in the past tense. However, it’s a small complaint, and one that I got used to by the time I was about a third of the way through.

Other than that, and the confusion with the rather large cast, I thought it an excellent novel, and liked it more and more as it progressed. There’s nothing particularly deep about this story; it’s set in the circles the author knows best, with army life and boarding school and sailing all being part of everyday life for many of the characters. But they’re warm, and believable, and their misunderstandings and struggles feel very real.

The ending - with one or two surprises which I wasn’t expecting - works well, tying up several ends, and leaving a great deal open for the future. I can’t now remember whether Lizzie and Piers (and Tilda) appear in any of Marcia Willett’s later books, but I hope very much to meet them again at some point.

Very highly recommended to anyone who enjoys character-based women’s fiction.

Review copyright 2020 Sue's Book Reviews