A contemplative science fiction romance on colonisation and vulnerability.
They arrived in a space vessel named Montifringilla and they came to know this planet as 'Heim,' 'Home.' It was a harsh home of black rock covered in red soil and curious natural phenomena. The light was deafening, the day/night cycle was dependent on the strong wind currents, far away there was an ocean black and riddled with tornadoes. Nothing grew there, nothing lived there. It was a place unlike any they had known. But then they adapted. They learned to live with the unstable diurnal cycle, to shelter from the winds, to write in order to communicate because nothing but light makes a sound here, and to grow food in the little soil they found.
The brambling had made its nest.
It didn't take long before their hopes had to be adjusted. They could live there, but the planet wasn't able to sustain more then thirty-three of them, not with their equipment and knowledge. So when one pregnancy was announced, somebody would already have had to have died, or someone would have to, to make room for the child. Dying from old age was no longer viable.
To this world, Su was born. Her full name is Susanna, but her mother calls her Su – and since her mother is the first of the main characters, and the narrator of her sections, the reader also comes to know Su as Su.
Su, you need to wake up. I'm going to tell you a story. About someone who found a foreign planet. Are you listening, mummy's little girl? There was some people who went out in a ship named after a bird, they travelled far and they travelled for a long time until they finally arrived at a storm. They went into the storm, even if they knew they could never return from there, away from everything that they knew. Wake up, Su, you must hear this. You must listen to what mummy is telling you. On the other side they found a planet, they called it Sedes because it was going to become their new home. After a time a girl was born on this planet. And that was you, Su. That was you. (p. 5; reviewer's own translation)
This is how Fugl (translation: Bird) begins; this quote is the entire first page, the entire first chapter. At this point Su is approximately a year old, asleep, and lives on a planet where voices can't be heard, the first new generation here, getting related verbally a story she is too young to understand by the only generation there to have known their former home. It is a very strange but meaningful event.
The reader gets to spend more time with the other protagonist: 'the man.' He lives generations after Su and her mother and is Montifringilla's ranger and wandering geologist. He is the only one who leaves the colony, to take his measurements, to see how the planet changes over time – he is the only one who gets to walk this beautiful desolation.
The wind drags across the landscape in the morning. Light from a sun. In a mountain range in a small depression in an egg-shaped tent, a man sits up. He stretches. The landscape is stark and desolate, only red sand interrupted by a few dark rocky crags, no vegetation, no movement, static, dead, only gusts of wind that pokes the red sand, crimson-red filings more than grains.
[...]
The man ascends the mountain. The feet sinks into the sand, but no trail is left behind, as soon as he lifts his foot, the sand runs back in, the print is planed out, adjusts itself as if no human has ever trod there. At the top of the pass, he stops. Around him the mountainous landscape stretches in all directions, red, desolate. The sun has risen further above him, the sound across the landscape has grown in force, what was once a muffled fizzing, is now a penetrating crackling, a tremor in the air which cuts through the flesh and scratches at the bones. With an apparatus from his backpack, he makes quick routine measurements, while the wind continually increases in strength, pulls harder on the fabric of his suit, nudges the topmost sand filings. The wind breathes on him, envelops his visor like a membrane. He remains standing like this for a while, squinting into the dawning. Then he puts the apparatus back into the backpack and walks down again, back to where he came from. (p. 7-8; reviewer's own translation)
This is the landscape which one can see from a bird's eye view on the cover of the book. It must be lonely to live on a planet like this as a part of its only colony.
Yet when a new ship finally lands the locals aren't ready to welcome them with open arms. Making a life for oneself in a defiant landscape demands tenacity and an understanding of the local conditions. Those who arrive might not have the will to either. When looking at Su's mother, why should these be any different? Perhaps they will be a burden, a strain on the local resources, unwilling to do what they need to fend for themselves. That could mean the difference between life and death. The ship certainly doesn't seem very promising – fear and distrust ensues.
But this is a love story. On the new ship comes 'the woman.' Her name is Sigismunda. It turns out that the man is named Persiles. Names that sound as if they are taken from a classic romance novel, because they are. True love is a rarity in a population which needs to protect themselves against inbreeding, so the man already has a chosen one for him. True love can sometimes be a challenge to the demands of reality.
Bird, by the names chosen for him and her, calls upon the classic work Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, written in 1616 by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, famed author of Don Quixote. In it Persiles is the prince of one Nordic land, and Sigismunda the princess of another, and their love brings them on a long journey to Rome, where all roads lead. On this journey they get to experience much which gives them answers on how love can be, how it is sometimes right to follow it in spite of the expectations of others, and also how people can be kind of heart and true of soul no matter where in the world one goes – the reconciliation of peoples in the wake of the colonisation effort was very important to Cervantes.
Yet, Bird is a post modern romance, not a classical one; it was written by a member of a colonised people, the Same, rather than by a member of the colonisers, like Cervantes was. These tribulations will be very different from those of the Persiles and Sigismunda of old, and hold answers which ring true to anyone belonging to a minority. The novel has yet not seen an English translation, but it has a powerful and clear message one only finds in a select few books. Bird deserves a wider audience, let there be no doubt about that.