The Birds of the Air

by Alice Thomas Ellis

"Mary felt rather like someone for whom a marriage was being arranged by people who doubted the suitability of the match but could think of no seemly way of retiring. Her family and friends behaved like outsiders privy to a secret and dubious courtship, treating her with an arch, considered and wholly unnatural care, whispering together and falling silent when they remembered her sitting by the window and possibly listening." Mary Marsh has lost her only child, but rather than allow her peace in which to grieve, her mother cajoles her into participating in a proper family Christmas. As the various guests arrive, Mary's sister Barbara, Barbara's children and husband, Barbara's lover, Barbara's husband's lover (the Thrush), Vera and Dennis the neighbors, a grown cat and a kitten, the house descends into farcical chaos.

Genres: Fiction, Christmas, British Literature, Family, Literary Fiction

61 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Alice Thomas Ellis was short-listed for the Booker prize for The 27th Kingdom. She is the author of A Welsh Childhood (autobiography), Fairy Tale and several other novels including The Summerhouse Trilogy, made into a movie starring Jeanne Moreau and Joan Plowright.

Reviews

[Antoinette · Rating 4 out of 5]

“ You must pick the raisins out of the cake,” she (Mrs. Marsh) had said. Just look for what is good in your life.”

Poor Mrs. Marsh- Christmas is looming and she finds herself coping with the problems of both her daughters. Mary, the eldest, has gone into a profound shock after the death of her son, Robin. Mrs. Marsh can’t understand why she can’t pull herself together. Barbara and her family have now turned up and Barbara, the younger, easier daughter, has a major issue as well.

“Christmas was like a storm washing people to and fro to end up, unwanted, in each other’s homes.”

What a horrific Christmas Day. All jammed in together with extra guests. Drinking copiously to get through the day. Mrs. Marsh- trying so hard to make it all work but it was useless. Mary drowning in her sorrow and Barbara trying to drown her sorrow. Then we have Sebastian, a despicable man- Barbara’s husband and her two kids, Sam( the rebellious one) and Kate ( the perfect, obnoxious one).

Barbara’s son, Sam, was a definite bright light to what could have been a very depressing tale. He was a disobedient teenager, with a chip on his shoulders, but he brought the much needed humour to break up the sombreness.

This book is beautifully written but I must admit to having to look up quite a few, unknown to me words. “Autochthonous” anyone?

This is my first book by this author, but it will not be my last. Her characters certainly come to life with her skilful touch.

I learned after finishing this book that the author had a teenage son who died a few years before she wrote this book. She captured Mary’s grief and her loss of interest in life very realistically.

Published: 1978

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in a day after seeing Antoinette's review here. I used to read a lot of Thomas Ellis' books - I really enjoyed them, she is known for her dark, or perhaps sly humour and as Antoinette points out her exotic vocabulary. I came across this one:

A number of ladies and gentlemen had sat down in a high chamber with a great fire, and since they had fasted through Advent they longed for the feast to start and looked hungrily at the middle of the board where stood a wooden charger bearing a roast engastered swan, the erstwhile lord of the lake.

"Engastered" - it defied the Google English dictionary - returning 'no such word' however it did say there was a Portuguese word "engastado" from Engastar, which means "to set" or "mounted", for example "pedras engastadas em um anel" (stones set in a ring). Apart from allowing me to understand Alice here, I was entirely engaged because I am trying to learn Portuguese - and the word did strike me as connected to Medieval, food based and some how bound - or bonded - an image came to my mind of the glazed pork they like to serve here, quince in the mouth etc.

Vocabulary aside the book is also full of violence, death and the natural world; Bacchanalia, in other words, chaos. There is also, however, plenty of humour in the form of social satire which I think the author was hoping would offset the deep abyss of grief the central character Mary experiences over the death of her son, Robin.

In fact it is for those experiences that I read the book, in one sitting. It's short, just 154 pages, which suits the whirl-wind setting of a Christmas holiday, bringing together the various members of Mrs Marsh's middle-class family, her daughters, Mary and Barbara plus husband Sebastian, from his elite university sphere, and children, Sam and Kate, plus various neighbours and a particular friend of Mary's a Mr Hunter, and his boss an American publisher, a Mr Mauss, who takes a shine to Kate. Yes, it's a Bacchanalian scene, but that's sort of hidden under the decorative feasting of an English Christmas.

Let me focus on the source of this great whirling, manic energy of chaos and nihilation. It is Mary; here are several examples of grief beautifully rendered, or perhaps better, realistically captured. Mrs Marsh, having lost her husband, John not too long ago is trying to look after her daughter, who has returned to the family home:

'Why didn't you turn the light on?' she asked, though if it had been on she would have asked why Mary hadn't called her to do it, or remarked that too much light was bad for the eyes. Life had so treated her in recent years that she couldn't trust it to itself for a second. A solitary magpie -vain, god-cursed bird, clad in its eternal half-mourning - flew forever across her mind's eye and had to be propitiated or cunningly foiled with constant changing and rearranging. By questioning and vigilance might be deflected.

The author allows us to see the wide gap between mother and daughter; it is a space of difference in temperament, but also a generational one:

[Mrs Marsh] missed John very badly. She permitted herself to weep a little each morning in the bathroom before she put on her eyeshadow, but she knew and accepted what apparently Mary did not - that life had to go on. Mary had gone far, but had been wounded and forced to return; and her mother felt that ever so slightly spiteful vindication of the keeper of the cage. The bird had come back, if only to die.
Mary was at the window again, watching the antics of the wind.

The narrative switches to a comparison of a party at Barbara's house - entertaining the Dons and Professors, with her son Sam, recording bits of disjointed conversations. He pushes through the guests all of whom he despises. Barbara learns of her husband's affair, when she watches him, lower a chunk of turkey between the red lips of Mrs Thrush, a plump lady in Indian skirts and an ethnic bag, and then we are switched back to the swirling gloom of Mary's thoughts; and the sharp, faked brightness of her mother:

'Another cup?' asked Mrs Marsh, glancing with disfavour at the now ebony-gleaming windows. 'Anyone could see in,' she complained.
'Not a great many people frequent other people's gardens,' said Mary, wary of curtains - for what if tonight should become the day of resurrection, and Robin stand unseen in the garden? Dies irae.

Mary remembers the funeral which took place the preceding summer, in a village in Wales, Melys y Bwyd, which the family must have visited often for summer vacations.

Mrs Marsh remembers the countryside:

Wandering fondly down this memory lane she came to a sudden halt - even recollection shadowed and chilled by the black yews that crouched enormously in the churchyard. Robin she thought angrily. [. . . ] She glanced guiltily at her daughter.

Mary remembered the lane, pretty as a wedding, when she was a child: great laces of nets and umbels flung joyously down, meadowsweet and cow parsley; the wind whispering sentimentally on the crisp blossom of the blackthorn and sighing through the handkerchief-scented grasses; wild roses every shade of bridesmaid from hoydenish pink to the frailest nervous pallour;
[. . .]
It was a long time ago. Since then, down that wedding lane, dazed with summer, Robin had come, borne in a long black hearse sorrowful with dying wreaths - Robin passive beyond understanding, disguised as stone.

And so Thomas Ellis weaves this lush remembering between Mother and daughter using Nature especially to represent the wild longings in Mary for her son.

Ellis constantly flicking between one perspective and the other, highlighting their different natures, one so practical, and the other Ephemeral, the word that Kate, Mary's niece asks her mother to spell.

Mrs Marsh, again:

'Why you had to have a funeral in the country . . .' her mother was saying. Father's buried here . . . all that way . . . so tiring. . .' Mrs Marsh had imagined for a while that Mary would now understand her and grow closer, but Mary had burned, as remote as a salamander in a blazing exaltation of grief, seeming to draw energy from what should have devoured her, and when she emerged she had, it is true, changed, but she was no closer.'

The mother is insisting on the needs of the living and Mary, in true mourning is unresponsive. All her thoughts are with the dead. She knows that the living are eternally selfish with their needs and demands; with their phrases of 'life must go on'. Mary's only response, must it? which is my understanding of how she feels.

I think this book is remarkable in its portrait of how isolating grief is. There is no-one in her family or in her sphere, who can understand her loss. Mary's grief in fact is so deep, that it looks as if she will not recover. All life around her is a whirling chaos of madness; and this becomes fully represented in the Christmas gathering scenes that ensue. The amount of over-eating is obscene from Mary's perspective. She repeatedly retires to her own small room, but endures the intrusions of Sam, with his green hair, and then Hunter. Mrs Marsh peers in, and actually sees her daughter laughing in Hunter's company. Her other daughter, Barbara however is on the prowl, having targeted Hunter as the ideal revenge on her husband, Sebastian, for his betrayal. Barbara becomes magnificently drunk and there is a great scene when she lures Hunter up the stairs, but ends up falling in a mess to the bottom, just as the other party members return. They had temporarily disappeared across the road to view Evelyn's paintings - and that was the opportunity for Barbara to pounce. Hunter, however, has his life organised and lives alone, he is genuinely a friend of Mary's - and nothing else.

Let's have some more Bacchanal: Evelyn has brought a feral kitten as a present for Mary, a distraction, but Mrs Marsh, in her fastidiously neat home has a nightmare image on the revelation of this present:

Mrs Marsh was very cross. She had a chaotic vision of half-eaten birds, cat mess, hairs and future generations of kittens all over the house and garden. [. . .]
I've got a ribbon to put round its neck, and a card,' said Evelyn, 'so I'll come round in the morning and put them on.' She was a little disappointed at Mrs Marsh's lack of enthusiasm and wondered uneasily whether she would appreciate the painting of the lunatic asylum seen through the branches of a laburnum tree that was to be her own present.
'Have a sherry,' said Mrs Marsh at last, taking pity on her friend's downcast mien.

Meanwhile Mary has offered to do the sprouts for the Christmas dinner, and here are her thoughts:

Mary smiled down on the sprouts. No one understood that she was incapable of grieving sufficiently for Robin, whose death had seemed so preposterously catastrophic that all the acceptedly appropriate reactions were inadequate. The advice, commonly offered, that she should give herself up to and just let go, struck her as incomparably fatuous. She bore herself with care, like a glass already singing which would shatter at a touch; and she smiled quite often, for it was useless to deny that the situation had its humorous side. There had, after all, been only one little death.

Madness or the flip-side of reason, insanity is the other main theme along with death; cleverly wound around with humour that Thomas Ellis maintains in her story. We see here Mary verging on that isolation that leads to craziness; a word oft repeated. She is surrounded by people in her mother's little house and yet not-a-one knows what she is thinking or feeling. She has no expression for her grief; and that is a dangerous road.

The time had come they considered for a sherry.
Mary shuddered. So much food. The little gods fed on human blood - those dark gods in whom joy and sorrow, good and evil, mercy and malice were as irredeemably mixed as the breadcrumbs, onion, sausage and celery in the force for the turkey. But they were, she assured herself, merely a mark of man's confusion, a symbol of that gloomy theory, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which suggests that all construction, movement, endeavour merely hasten that time when the world and all its works will be utterly undone, a whirling mass of dust in an infinite desolation.

And that thought introduces a remarkable parable in the middle of Ellis's story. It reads like a fable from another age, of an ascetic, a monk arriving at a great feast. And here my friends, I have returned you to the beginning of my review. We are back with the engastered swan, on its wooden charger, on a table in a great hall of the past in Mary's mind. That paragraph above allows us to see that madness is not the negative alternative that we peremptorily believe it to be, but in fact a way out. Mary's vision of a feast, that she remembers from Melys y Bwyd is an undoing of all we accept as the norm; it is an opening to a different reality. And there my readers I will stop. If you want to discover the rest of the story, or in fact the incredible myth retold here, you will have to read this book for yourselves.

A number of ladies and gentlemen had sat down in a high chamber with a great fire, and since they had fasted through Advent they longed for the feast to start and looked hungrily at the middle of the board where stood a wooden charger bearing a roast engastered swan, the erstwhile lord of the lake.

Within this swan were concealed other birds, each containing one smaller. And at the very centre of all, where once had been the swan's liver, was a wren's egg, boiled.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I feel like God's Granny, thought Mrs. Marsh."

My sympathies were entirely with Mrs. Marsh. Christmas Day in the company of her two adult daughters, one of whom was enveloped in grief after losing her son, and the other who had just found out her husband was cheating on her. Two equally obnoxious grandchildren, her loathsome son-in-law, a neighbor who wanted to help, but was guilty of unsanitary habits in the kitchen, two guests from London, one an American, and a couple who were only invited to drinks because Mrs. Marsh felt sorry for them. Lunch is late, turkey is overdone, everyone has too much to drink, and snow is making travel impossible. And all Mrs. Marsh wanted was a simple Christmas that she had worked hard to prepare for.

"She told herself that alive or dead she wouldn't undergo another Christmas. The year's accumulated ill-will seemed always to find expression at this time. Relations who throughout most of the year had the sense to stay apart confined themselves in small spaces to eat and drink too much."

We've all been there at some point. It was actually refreshing to read of such a Christmas Day disaster after other seasonal books that ended on a kinder note. The humor was perfect and had me laughing at several times in this short novel. Thanks to Antoinette for leading me to this one with her review.

[Betty · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can you say about a book that uses "autochthonous" as an adjective?

This is a book about grief over the loss of a child. Mary's inability to "get on with life" makes her the most understandable character, almost a tonic against her chattering mother, philandering brother-in-law, desperate sister, insolent nephew, precocious niece. Mix in a few neighbors and acquaintances in a too small house at Christmas and you could almost scream. Alice Thomas Ellis' acerbic wit saves this book. She says the things you think but don't say out loud, only better.

I was happy that the publisher saved his commentary for an afterword. I hate introductions and always skip them until after I have read the text and drawn my own conclusions.

[JacquiWine · Rating 4 out of 5]

While Christmas is often trumpeted as the season to be jolly, it can be an incredibly stressful time for many, throwing us together with relatives we rarely see and may well dislike, encouraging us to stuff ourselves with food and drink, and generally disturbing our usual routines. It’s a set-up that Alice Thomas Ellis cleverly explores in her excellent novel, The Birds in the Air, set in the fictional suburb of Innstead, a British hinterland between town and country.

As the book opens, the widowed Mrs Marsh is preparing for the forthcoming arrival of her extended family, trying to get things ready for the busy festive season. Her eldest daughter, Mary, is mourning the loss of her son, Robin, whose death hangs over the novel, intermittently alluded to but never fully explained. Mrs Marsh, on the other hand, is a stoical woman, very much of the ‘life must go on’ way of thinking, an approach that clashes directly with Mary’s lack of interest in day-to-day life. In truth, Mary wants to be left alone to nurse her grief, avoiding interactions with others, especially over Christmas.

She wished she could lie in the garden and come up later with the crocuses. What a rest that would be. She had lost interest in the world. A world in which Robin could die was a foolish, trivial place where nothing made sense and she had no desire to linger. (p. 102)

Meanwhile, Mrs Marsh’s other daughter, the dutiful Barbara, is embroiled in her own problems, prompted by the realisation that her husband – the loathsome Sebastian – is having an affair. As Barbara observes the various guests at their pre-Christmas drinks party, she spies Sebastian flirting with the wife of one of his colleagues, thereby confirming what her son, Sam, has already discovered.

Barbara was trying to be brave. She was cold, and her hands shook. Her face was dry and wore a cutout smile, as stiff and unnatural as a cardboard party mask, and she hardly knew what she was saying to the mobile faces around her as they opened and shut to speak or eat. She had told herself repeatedly that everyone else in this room had had extra-marital affairs and no one had died of it. No one minded any more – it was acceptable, it was smart, it was only human, it was ‘sophisticated’. At the old-fashioned word she felt tears in her eyes. She had never even learned to be sophisticated and now that everything had passed beyond the very concept she was lost – a stranger among her friends. (p. 34)

To read the rest of my review, please visit:

https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2022...

[Josephine (Jo) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the story of a family thrown together at Christmas, each with their own problems worries and foibles. At the hub of the preparations is Mrs Marsh who is herself grieving for her husband John but she is of the old school, stiff upper lip and 'life must go on'. Her daughter Mary is grieving in a very different way for her only child and Mrs Marsh tries constantly to engage her with all the everyday events leading to the upcoming holiday. Mary wants to be left alone, she has had a complete physical and mental breakdown and is just not interested in the hustle and bustle of the house. Mrs Marsh is running round in circles trying to make sure that nothing is forgotten and that there is enough to feed all the family when they arrive.
Her second daughter Barbara is coming with her family for the holiday, she is constantly struggling to be a 'good wife' to her university professor husband who is an obnoxious, cheating bore. Barbara has just found out that he is cheating with one of his colleagues and is trying, not very successfull,y to keep the 'stiff upper lip' like her mother. Barbara and her husband Seb have two children, the teenage Sam who is rebelling against everything his father is and behaving like an oaf just to annoy him, and the younger Kate who is a precocious little show off who I immediately wanted to slap! Throw into the mix Seb's publisher Hunter who becomes the target of Barbara's unrequited affection, his American colleague Max who is visiting, they become stranded at Mrs Marsh's house because of snow. Then the neighbours turn up and add to the mayhem. Barbara becomes tired and emotional, and the whole day turns into a sort of stage farce. I found it a little slow going and none of the characters were particularly likeable but it was funny to watch the gradual disintegration of polite façade as everyone shows their true feelings and Mrs Marsh continues to try and keep things normal.
What I did find lovely was the descriptive writing about the surrounding countryside using such beautiful similes and especially the Wedding Lane which Mary remembers so vividly on the day that her son's funeral cortege drove down it in the spring.

[Dominika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny and heartbreaking at the same time, and wonderfully crafted. This little novel cut right through to a lot of what I'm feeling right now.

"Doors had lost significance, since not one would ever open to admit Robin."

"It seemed hard that mothers should be the means of letting into the trap that was life those creatures they loved best in the world. For despite their designation the entrance was not entrancing nor the exit exciting. And the space between held more of bitterness than was promised with the salt, the balm, the joyous clear water and the white cloth of baptism."

[Sherri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is just the sort of Advent read I like.

Mrs. Marsh, a widow, is hosting her two daughters and assorted neighbors and friends in her home for Christmas. Mary, the older, is still debilitated by grief after the death of her daughter some months earlier. Barbara, the younger, is coping with the the recent discovery of her husband's infidelity. So is her cranky adolescent son, Sam, although Barbara does not know it.

The book is soaked with grief, anger, betrayal and loss. It is also rife with acerbic and sometimes farcical humour, particularly in Mrs. Marsh's home on Christmas day. It's not too sweet on the tongue, but so piquant I couldn't resist savoring it anyway.

What the book ultimately does is invest the reader (the appropriately attentive and engaged reader, anyhow) with all the longing of the Advent season-- the double longing both for the hope of Christmas and that hope's completion in the second Advent of Christ: although set during Advent and Christmas, resurrection is the almost entirely unspoken need for the people in this novel.

It's a rich text, but so readable I'm sure I missed most of what's there to be sussed out. I'm going back for another read shortly.

Highly recommended.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This very, very funny story about a very, very dysfunctional family's Christmas serves as the backdrop for the character Mary, who having lost her only son no longer sees the point in living. Alice Thomas Ellis must have been an amazing person, because she was able to write this hilarious/heartbreaking book soon after the tragic death of her 19 year old son. Knowing that Mary's grief is in truth Ellis's makes the book unforgettable.

[Beth Bonini · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Won't it be nice when Barbara and Kate are here?' urged Mrs Marsh. 'And Sam and Sebastian too,' she added with less enthusiasm.
'Lovely,' agreed Mary.
'A family Christmas,' continued Mrs Marsh dreamily. 'All of us together.'

Mrs Marsh is the widowed mother of two daughters: Barbara and Mary. She lives in a tidy house in 'Honeyman's Close' - a middle-class enclave as denuded of messy life as possible. There are no dogs, cats or children - only the 'birds' in the air. Mrs Marsh thinks of herself as an eminently reasonable and reliable person; unfortunately, no one else in her small family orbit can be counted on to be equally predictable and satisfactory. 'She could cope with anything if people would be happy, would make an effort, Really, it seemed as if only she held all her world together.

Mary cannot be happy, though, because she has recently lost her son Robin. Despite her mother's best attempts at comforting meals and banalities, she cannot find any succour or much point to life. Barbara cannot be happy because her husband Sebastian is having an affair and her teenage son Sam will not stop being difficult. As Mary and Barbara enter into restless and deeply disappointing middle age, they pose a terrible worry for their mother, their poor mother, who only wants everything and everyone to be 'nice'. As one might imagine, it's unlikely to be a jolly Christmas.

This is a slight book, both in terms of length and plot, but it is crispy written and even darkly funny. It's a 'Middle England, middle classes' book which feels a bit dated in terms of its female characters, but the writing style of Alice Thomas Ellis impressed me. She's a clever stylist, with a wonderfully cynical eye. This is the first book I've read of hers, but I shall certainly seek out more of them.

[Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set at Christmastime in a suburban community in England, this novel uses a merciless humor to expose the flaws and foibles of its characters. The widow Mrs. Marsh is trying to care for her grown daughter, Mary, who has been ill with grief since her son Robin died the previous summer, but mother seems at risk of irritating daughter to death. Mrs. Marsh's other daughter, Barbara, is married to a professor; their marriage is under severe strain and their son Sam is rebelling while their daughter Kate seems nauseatingly well-behaved. Thematically, Ellis is concerned with death and resurrection and with the gap between the meaning and the practice of religious faith.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved this book, so beautifully written. Its so short but contains multitudes. A book to consider reading if you are feeling fed up with the Christmas season. Funny, sad, all the vicissitudes of life. Definitely one I will reread.

[Jonny Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this weird catholic woman and her crazy / witty little novels

[Xani · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wisecrack per page ratio on this is outta control

[Anne Tucker · Rating 3 out of 5]

strange short book with an infinitely detailed comedy of manners in a lower middle-class (it seemed to me) family home at Christmas. Th family assembles at the house of the grandmother, always known as Mrs March. Her 2 daughters and 2 grandchildren arrive along with a couple of other men. One daughter is continuously grieving the recent death of her son (whicb embarrasses them all). The other daughter knows that her husband is being unfaithful with someone they call The Thrush; she in turn fancies one of the batchelor visitors. Everything buikds up to the dreaded Christmas day.
The climax is truly laugh-out-loud wonderful and made the whole slow build up beforehand so worth the effort!
Some lovely insights, but I doubt i would have reached the excellent end if the book had been much longer as it was extremely slow, and none of the characters were very likeable.

[Yuri Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hilarious but deadly hatchet job on the English upper-middle class and their Christmas. The sheer mean-spiritedness of most of the protagonists, their small-minded determination to do nothing other than what looks after Number One, is brilliantly and unflinchingly depicted. The only “good” characters are hopelessly buried under grief or aimless rebellion – Is the dying of your hair green pointless in a society in which good taste is small porcelain animals?
And yet, perhaps because the bad behavior is so accurately pinned like insects, the reader can step back and sense a larger spirit of tolerance and forgiveness. You will be ambushed by wry smiles of recognition as you encounter Ellis’s pithy character sketches.

[Christopher Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the first twenty pages I didn't much like this book. I found the writing a shade too pretentious even for me, and the metaphor of the birds (I mean, come on - the dead son was called Robin...) a bit too trite. But I gave it some time, and before I knew it I was on the way to reading the whole short book in a single sitting. Ellis's writing began to grow on me - her similes became more telling and more precise, and her characters more fleshed-out. I was actually a little sad that it all ended when it did - I would have been grateful for another twenty or thirty pages, but that would have meant ending the book with some kind of reconciliation - and that would have been antithetical to Ellis's point.

[Poornima Vijayan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my second Alice Thomas Ellis and I picked it up because I was blown by how brilliantly written 'The 27th Kingdom' was. Alice Thomas Ellis knows how to write. And this book 'The Birds of Air' is about grief and how one deals with it. Not everyone's handing of grief is the same and we tend to judge people who do it in a way that's not common.

Her writing is really good and the premise of the novel- a family gathering for Christmas, is nothing unusual. It's a well written book and maybe it was the way she was handling her grief about the death of her son Joshua. It's a likable book if you like good writing but there's really nothing more.

[JoTownhead · Rating 4 out of 5]

A family Christmas observed with brilliant clarity. Grieving Mary, betrayed Barbara, obnoxious Seb and offspring are immediately recognisable - and who doesn't know a Mrs Marsh? A snapshot of inter-related lives, full of clever insights and genuinely funny with Mrs Marsh's thoughts and behaviour providing the best laughs.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sad, poignant, Ellis deserves more attention.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

i really enjoyed this book. to be fair quite a few of the words went over my head but it seemed to just flow and i couldnt put it down. a good xmas book to read during the xmas period!

[Andy Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delicious novella of middle-class family angst.

[Fiona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Witty and full of sharp observations

[Hilary Tesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary is living at her recently widowed mother’s house following the death of her only son, Robin. Whilst Mary cannot escape her over riding grief, her well intended mother, Mrs Marsh, allows her no peace and so plans an elaborate “proper” Christmas, inviting her other daughter, Barbara and her dysfunctional family to join them in the small house.

Barbara has just discovered her “reasonable” husband, a university lecturer, is having an affair with another Don’s wife. Her son is delightfully rebellious and her obnoxious daughter has been encouraged to think she’s a genius. Add in Barbara’s sudden crush on her husband’s publisher, Hunter, the presence of his American counterpart and well meaning neighbours and Mrs Marsh’s organised Christmas is about to descend into chaos.

The author does not spell things out - she leaves the reader to work out their own impressions of the characters. They are not all likeable but they all provoke a reaction. Conservative Mrs Marsh’s irritating fussing over Mary shows her care for her daughter whilst her determination that one should keep going regardless is demonstrated by her worry over whether she has enough supplies for Christmas. Mary’s extreme grief prompts compassion as we are left to wonder at the circumstances of her son’s death and his age at the time. Sam’s rebellion and self doubt is contrasted with precious Kate’s precocious behaviour - I wholly sympathised with Sam!

There’s some hilarious moments, such as when the Sam records snippets of conversations at his parents’ party and plays them back, when Evelyn delivers the kitten and when green haired Sam tips a jug cold coffee grounds over his mother’s head when he tries to sober her up!

All in all, it’s a delight - skilful writing packed into just 154pages.

[NoID · Rating 3 out of 5]

C’est avec le souvenir en tête de la sublime trilogie du jardin d’hiver (Les habits neufs de Margaret, Les ivresses de madame Monro et Les égarements de Lili) que je me suis lancé dans ces oiseaux du ciel.

Certes, la satire sociale des familles anglaises est délicieuse et l’humour grinçant bien présent. Pour autant, j’ai trouvé que ce petit livre manquait un peu de tonus et peinait à conclure, malgré l’annonce du désastre annoncé

https://www.noid.ch/les-oiseaux-du-ciel/

[Ange · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't find this anything remarkable - in fact it was rather dreary. Perhaps I wasn't paying attention to the story well enough but having chosen it because of its brevity and attractive cover I found that's all there was to recommend it.

[Isabel (kittiwake)]

The rooms were inconveniently crowded and Sam was constantly halted by determined talkers engrossed in what they were saying and loth to move lest someone should seize the chance to interrupt with his own view of the topic under discussion.



Beyond the ridge, beyond the hollow, lay the old wolf-coloured woods, grizzled with snow: ground untouched by man, who could find no use for it. There would have been forest there when the Great Worm lay curled in the declivity, where now were raised neat and placid chimneys, and the Terrible Lizard moved along the cat's ridge, ambulant architecture, a saurian cathedral, the Creator's tribute to himself before he thought of making men to praise his genius.

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Couldn't put this down. A scarily accurate book about ordinary people put down on a page by an amazing writer with the skill and sympathy of a scalpel. The painful images of the characters left emblazoned on my mind sit side by side guiltily with a desperate wish I could write like her.

[Chad D]

I prefer individual lines in the book to the book's cumulative effect, but the lines are wonderful.

"'I'm writing a book of verse,' said Kate. . . . Hunter wanted to reply 'Then stop it at once.'"

[Kerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful writing - funny, cleverly and observantly drawn characters, sharply satirical and incredibly sad. Loved it.