lAbout a week after his wife’s sudden death, a grieving man opens his front door to a giant crow which pulls him into its wing and tells him: “I’m not leaving until you need me.” She is still in shock and faces the problem of raising her two young sons alone. Bird, who has been wandering around the family flat earlier in the night, has noticed that the house is “overwhelmingly mournful, every surface is the dead mother, every crayon, tractor, coat, covered in a film of grief”. At that first meeting, the man “woke up and did not see me despite the blackness of his trauma”.
First published in 2015 and adapted as a play and film, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers is an inventive and deeply observed novel by Max Porter that uses poetry, dialogue, and the supernatural to examine a family grappling with the loss of a wife and mother who “got busy with life, and then she was gone”. In a story that alternates between the perspectives of “Dad”, “Boys”, and “Crow”, we learn that the man is a writer working on a book called Crow on the Couch, about the poet Ted Hughes.
This is a new recording with Russell Tovey as narrator. Deftly navigating the book’s shape-shifting, fragmented style, the actor delivers a brilliant performance in which he brims with compassion and menace as the crow and portrays the father’s devastation with a deftness that notes how “moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sane person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush it.”
Available through Faber, 1 hour 52 minutes
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