Book Review: Up, up and away

'Enuresis nocturna. Involuntary nighttime urinary incontinence after about the age of three when there is no obvious physical condition or nervous illness. Over-anxious mothering or an authoritarian father can lead to the habit in some cases being a symptom of so-called regression, meaning that the child copes with several external stress by reverting to patterns of behavior from an earlier stage of its development as a way of avoiding mental breakdown.’

The first half of Tomas Bannerhed’s The Ravens is loaded with sinister illusions to mental breakdown and its many metaphors. The haze lifts midway when we realise all is not okay in the father’s head.

Set in a rural outpost of Sweden, the cast of characters is mainly one family that lives in Raven Fen, on a farm. The authoritarian father of Klas and Göran, two young boys, is an intimidating figure, who, when not hunched over dented metal buckets over at Oxmeadow, planting potatoes, or sorting hay, sits down at a table everyday, opens his oilcloth notebook and records the weather three times a day, in detail, as he had been doing since he was 14. The winds, the atmospheric pressure, precipitation, every factor that causes a leaf to stir is documented. ‘Trends and signs hundreds of different cloud formations and their consequences.’ At other times, he tosses barbs at his sons, for watching too many birds, or not being able to sit still in class.

The narrative is dark, edgy, and non-linear. The narrator is young Klas, with a passion for learning about birds. At one point, Klas is talking about rose finches and marsh warblers, ‘maybe even honey buzzards’ when his mother, a kindly figure, tolerant of her husband’s diffidence and whimsy, says to him more than once:

‘You and your birds, don’t you 
ever tire of them?’ At one point when she asks her elder son this, her husband reacts:

‘Father’s expression turned grave. He looked alternately down at his bandage and out of the window: over to the right, the mountain of metal and rust; over to the left, the dry fen with its clouds of pollen. Then there was that fleeting smile again, like a flash of fire in the night. As if he were in another world. ‘Birds,’ he said. ‘They fly any way they like, don’t they?’

At another point after Christmas, when the Father returns home after a stint at an institution, where other inmates practise walking up and down and saluting jerkily, he gifts the family a smoke detector for the house. The reason: eventually everything burns.

In yet another instance, Klas watches his father ‘looking out at nothing, far away in his thoughts again. His jaws seemed to be chewing of their own accord, slowly and mechanically as if he was never actually going to swallow. Ice in his beard and empty, glazed eyes’.

‘What are you thinking about Father, I wanted to ask. As you sit there? That it will have been for nothing if I don’t take over? That your whole life’s been a waste?...’

Klas’s romantic interest is a girl called Veronika, who is not like the others, wears dungarees imprinted with flowers and stars and has an easy sing-song way of speaking. For Klas the bird lover, ‘Veronika’s eyebrows slant and taper at the side like a swift’s wings.’

Every other chapter leads to a passage or a page of freewheeling inner monologue in italics.

I am as tough as juniper and as hard as stone.

You’ll never be rid of me, if that was what you thought.

It’s not a good idea to read this book in spurts with long gaps between each reading. The flow has to be maintained to fully appreciate the depth of the writer’s skill with nature descriptions, his encyclopedic references to details of the bittern’s egg, the list of birds that rarely visit Europe, and to old copies of Field and Stream that talk about luring foxes with carrion, and ice-fishing strike alert systems.

A typical paragraph: ‘Once the screech of the gulls had died down, the proper night bird orchestra could finally come into its own. Deep in the sedge bog, the spotted crake started up, providing the beat; behind us perched the nightingale, its fluting and rattling like a whip to the ears; the sedge warbler grated and scolded and whistled as if in complete ecstasy behind the osiers. The common snipe, out courting, hurled themselves headlong from the sky, bleating for all they were worth; the great crested grebes rasped and the lapwings beeped and whined; the water rail was standing somewhere, hammering out his beat, his insistent kypp, kypp, kypp, kypp-’

‘And so it went..’

But if bird calls, a boy’s tormented stream-of-consciousness and memory, and a father’s Hitchcockian descent into madness as he imagines a crowding of ravens swooping into his being isn’t your cup of tea, then this very sharp translation of a riveting first-novel is best stayed away from.

nivriti@khaleejtimes.com