Book Review: Blackbird by Caitlin Galway
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Blackbird by Caitlin Galway |
| Aqueous Books, 2013 $14.00 |
Blackbird, the debut novel from Toronto-based author Caitlin Galway, is a complex work that displays the writer’s unique and fresh voice. In the book, Galway explores the dark corners of a young girl’s mind, Gwyneth Avery, as she tries to make sense of her world and the many odd characters she meets at Abbot House, an asylum. The story may remind some readers of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar; however, Galway is subtler than Plath and instead of traveling down dark hallways to death and despair, we meander through dimly lit rooms filled with often poetic musings about their contents.
The novel opens with Gwyn depicting the disappearance of her home. She does not do this objectively, but in a complicated, hypnotic manner that immediately draws readers into the world Galway has crafted around Gwyn’s mind. Gwyn says of the event, “If only they all had seen it, I could have explained everything. I could have made the world make sense, with cool air ruffling the water, a white country house disappearing.” And in the next paragraph, she is elsewhere, engaging with the girls of Abbot House. This moment offers a peek into the why of the novel. Why is Gwyn at Abbot House? Why is she troubled? Why do we take an interest in this journey? At this early stage, it because Galway creates dense emotions and images with complex meanings, all while using so few words. She writes:
I paid closer attention to an attic curtain blowing through a hole in the roof. I knew its face, of was and had been. That remarkable clean, uncomplicated silence. Then the house disappeared. As though swallowing a tossed stone, the lake closed over it. Yet the film began again, no beat in between, and the house drifted back into view, continuing its grave avenue down the coast. I watched the film until it became terrifying, until I felt it watching back.
This rich paragraph describes Gwyn’s journey through one specific memory, but we as readers are unsure if the sinking house did indeed disappear or if this is a metaphor constructed by Gwyn’s imagination. In either case, this allows us readers a small glimpse into her mind, how she builds her thoughts somewhat abstractly, but in ways that still make sense. It is complex, but not confusing, and I found its intrigue a powerful draw into the rest of the novel.
Gwyn’s path to discovery and recovery is understated and seems to take place between the lines. After seeing Gone with the Wind for the first time, she wants to know why Melanie had to die giving birth. She questions the fairness, asking, “…what had women done? Of course there was the story of Satan’s apple, but I wasn’t so sure about that. There must have been a sin so damnable that it continued on in our collective unconscious, marking its X in our chromosomes.” Here she’s not simply questioning why it’s so common for women to die during childbirth, but the uncertain truth of what she’s learned in Sunday school. She questions what constitutes a sin and why they carry such heavy punishments. In doing so, she is discovering what she believes and ultimately, herself.
Such realizations continue throughout the novel to its end, where Gwyn must cope with the death of a fellow Abbot House girl. She thinks, “I didn’t want to say what I was thinking. I tried to feel otherwise, as it went sagging through my feet, through ground and root, where Eve might have heard it… But she had thrown away her whole stupid life.” Even as she continues to push through drug abuse and daydreams of how she herself would “do it,” she comes to a single thought—to make “[her] own constellation from this collection of broken stars”— an ending readers desperately want for her after coming so far on their walk through her life.
This is Galway’s Blackbird, a headlong trek through Gwyn’s past, present, and future prospects as she sees them. It’s full of questions, uncertainty, poetry, darkness, and enlightenment. As one who enjoyed The Bell Jar, I can safely recommend this to fellow fans as well as those who did not have a taste for Plath’s harsher realities and gothic tone. Galway is subtle and alluring, a brilliant new author for both leisurely and literary readers.