The eponymous Birdeye is a commune in the Catskill Mountains. Long past its heyday, it still welcomes outsiders but visitors are few now. Liv, the commune’s matriarch, is sixty-seven, post cancer and with one daughter in England and the other, Rose, with a complex set of needs. The other two permanent members of the commune, Sonny and Mishti, have news and into this mix comes Conor, a new arrival with secrets of his own.
Not, I must say, the kind of premise that would normally have me reaching for a book but I was lucky enough to be present to hear Heneghan give a reading and talk about the book at a recent Norwich Book Slam and so was inspired by the evening to seek it out. And I’m so glad I did.
Heneghan’s way with character and setting is nigh-on perfection. With the lightest of brushstrokes, Heneghan creates something that feels real, authentic in a way that many authors strive for but many fall short of. Liv is real, I’m sure of it. There’s a truthfulness to the depiction that goes beyond whether or not an actual person called Olivia exists and said or did any of these things. Her heartbreak, her anger, her love, her tiredness all ring unmistakably true.
Birdeye itself, and the damp mountainous region it sits in, feel tangible, a presence on the page. Grounded. Weather, as Tom Waits always maintains about songwriting, is a vital part of creating atmosphere and one can feel the rain, the chill in Birdeye, giving verisimilitude to the experience of the reader.
The events of the novel, in some way, matter less than this internal richness of setting and character, but Heneghan nevertheless gives us a plot to engage us, draw us in, asking questions we find ourselves needing answers to. Yet as dark as some of those secrets are, there’s no sensationalism here, no melodrama. The past is the mystery here; that and the impact it will have on the future. In many ways, the chain of events that dictate the narrative have all but passed; what’s left is for the characters to unpick their own stories and move on, and it’s never less than captivating.
An engaging style, a confidence in her creation and a certainty about where it’s headed, these are the gifts Heneghan offers the reader, and any reader who appreciates a mature, sensitive read should bite her hand off to accept them.
Judith Heneghan is a writer and editor and leads the MA Creative Writing programme at the University of Winchester. Her first novel, Snegurochka is set in Kyiv in the early 1990s and was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford/Ciccerone Travel Writing Awards. Her new novel, Birdeye – described by Costa Novel winner Claire Fuller as ‘Evocative, haunting, masterful’ – is set in the Catskill Mountains, upstate New York. Both novels are published by Salt.
James Kinsley 