Glasgow-based artist Rose Ruane’s second novel opens with Lydia, a one-time pop star in the 1990s but now a forty-something stunted adolescent barely getting by. Living in a stultifying and run-down English seaside town, Lydia is coming to terms with her former music career and her problematic relationship in a post-MeToo context. In fact, when we first meet Lydia in chapter one she is considering killing herself before a phone call out of the blue from her old bandmate Pan pulls her back from the brink.
Pan is now a successful businesswoman who has bought a local hotel but she is much less successful as a person and a mother. Pan’s half-French daughter Laurence has changed her name to Lol and is struggling with her identity as well as her mother’s stringent expectations of her. When Lydia, who is also Lol’s godmother, moves into the hotel, the three women work on each other like sand on an oyster, irritant and essential to each other’s eventual awakenings. Meanwhile, Joyce, also in her forties, has never really grown up. She lives in a coercive relationship with her mother Betty, who is obsessed with propriety. The book’s shining light is Shandy, a local hairdresser whose marriage has descended from loving into abusive.
Ruane’s strongest point as a writer is her characters, who are fully realised and heart-rending and how she manipulates them to intersect, collide or narrowly miss each other is one of the most enjoyable parts of reading this book. The reader is always rooting for these women as they each arrive at their moments of reckoning, where their fear of offending people is finally outweighed by their fear of wasting their lives.
Birding is a sharp analysis of societal, gender and relationship expectations and the unnecessary harm they can inflict. Ruane deftly questions sexual dynamics ranging from abusive to dysfunctional to unhealthy, at one point articulating Lydia’s habit of acquiescing unwanted male desire as “a cashier redeeming a questionable voucher she’d lacked authority to refuse”. While the subject matter could be depressing, Ruane’s playful sense of humour adds plenty of levity resulting in a surprisingly moving and uplifting book that asks what it means to fully become ourselves.
