The Bird Woman (review)

It's not uncommon for novels published by New York houses to have promotional material that doesn't reflect what the book is actually about. The promotional material is filled with platitudes that supposedly help the book find its niche, and in the case of Kerry Hardie's The Bird Woman, these distortions do the novel a particular disservice because Hardie's ear is finely attuned to the subtleties of our intimate relationships, and the book is only partially about its apparent subject: a woman who has the ability to work as a healer—a gift that frightens and disturbs her.

Hardie is adept at creating tough-minded characters. In her first novel, A Winter Marriage, the protagonist is a woman in late middle age who marries for financial security, a bargain she believes she understands, but her life in a small village in the west of Ireland reveals her in unexpected ways. Hardie's second novel, The Bird Woman, also has a tough-minded protagonist, but Ellen McKinnon's prickly severity is born of her life in Northern Ireland, where she has grown up to believe a woman must keep her own counsel in order to survive.

The Bird Woman opens in Londonderry, where the protagonist, Ellen, a self-described "Presbyterian cynic," has married young, moving out of a home with a harsh mother and into a turbulent marriage. Ellen "sees" violent events before they happen, but her clairvoyance is an ability she doesn't want to acknowledge. After a miscarriage, and resulting stay in a mental hospital, Ellen has an affair with a sculptor named Liam and runs away to live with him. They marry, settle in the west of Ireland, have children together, and all the seeming happiness of a rustic and artistic life, but the fabric of her marriage is torn by what she doesn't see: her own unforgiving nature and Liam's complicated friendship with their friend Catherine.

Ellen tends to think in absolutes, and The Bird Woman's greatest strength is its portrayal of the cultural division between Protestants and Catholics, North and South. Hardie shows how politics affects everyone in Northern Ireland, how the political climate encourages a self-imposed divide.

"Up there we were too afraid to talk face to face, so silence seemed the only way. We talked among ourselves of course, told one another what they thought, what they were after, we stoked our own fears till they blazed up and licked at the rafters. For the rest, we left it to the politicians who defended and accused from the safety of the television studios. We listened to our own and turned away from theirs, unable to hear, deafened by the anger that rose in our blood and beat in our eyes before they were through the first sentence."

In the Republic, Ellen isolates herself from her former life. She has left her judgmental mother. Her family knows little of her life beyond her address, and they have never seen her children. Although Ellen feels that her break from her past is complete, her unwanted healing ability seems to arise from the denial of her clairvoyance. Hardie describes Ellen's abilities with an unsentimental physicality—there's no melting into showy, new-age swooning. But Ellen is not truly in control of her gifts. She's an angry woman, whose abilities work even when she does not want to engage those who come to her for help.

The novel opens with Ellen being summoned home because her mother is dying. Initially she doesn't want to go, but the novel ends a year after her mother's death, and in the transit of the novel, we have come a long way with Ellen. When she finally returns to the North, she learns a family secret that disarms her previous assumptions and sets her on the path to an uneasy acceptance of her own failings and those of others, an unsentimental and startling acceptance of the world as it is.