![]() If the history, served up in newspaper articles, is sometimes a little heavy-handed, both Julia and John Tredevant are satisfyingly complex. It has a tenuous, momentary feel, as if one were reading a Turner painting. Increasingly ill as she worked on this book, she observes in its afterword that 'under such a growing shadow,' the novel 'cannot help being full of a sharper light, rather as a landscape becomes brilliantly distinct in the last sunlight before a storm.' That sharp light illuminates the canvas of Birdcage Walk and gives it a charged radiance. ![]() The characters are thoughtful, complex and irritating sometimes they just talk about ideas. And why should it? Why narrow the scope of what a novel can do? The plot meanders, surprises. In this and other ways, Birdcage Walk defies and includes a number of genres it steadfastly refuses to be one thing. Occasionally, and for no apparent reason, she slips into the present tense. ![]() Birdcage Walk is not a novel in the form of a diary, a memoir, a letter or an internal monologue Lizzie’s voice comes out of the air. ![]() There’s no device or subtext to her story. ![]() Lizzie Fawkes is a naïve young woman, but she’s not a naïve narrator. ![]()
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