The Bird of Night, by Susan Hill (A Tale of Madness)

The Bird of Night By Susan Hill Saturday Review, 186 pp., $5.95 The “greatest poet of his age,” as envisioned by Susan Hill in her novel The Bird of Night, is an owlish, manic-depressive Scot named Francis Croft, aet. 33, who courts death imprisoned in the land of catatonia, an insanitarium of self where his nerve ends, always exposed, show themselves each to be more sensitive than a rice-weevil’s feeler. This isn’t really a novel. It’s a nervous breakdown. It’s a confession. Croft as a real character is totally unrealized, but, rather, thesis-wise, he’s shot to us right away in an indescribable shrillness and stays that way: a casebook barmy whose eccentric and perverse behavior stands as the single sine qua non of a genius in him we see nowhere else, certainly not in the snippets, of which we’re treated to samples, of his masterpiece, Janus. We just see Croft suffer, screech.

In a kind of reverse of James’s “The Aspern Papers,” Croft is protected from the world—which, true to type, of course, rudely seeks to burgle his letters, his diary, his soul—by a “guardian angel” figure, 34-year-old Harvey Lawson, scholar and Egyptologist, who has more patience than St. Monica and who, inexplicably (but I’ll accept love), assumes the role of wet nurse to the mad, suicidal poet, chronicling their mutual voyage to the end of night, which goes from Dorset, to Venice, to California, to a final bird sanctuary, as it were, called Schloss Vogel in Germany. Everywhere is death, of which the owl—perhaps I should have mentioned this sooner?—is an augur.

AT

About the Author

Alexander Theroux

Featured Tags

The Bird of Night By Susan Hill Saturday Review, 186 pp., $5.95 The “greatest poet of his age,” as envisioned by Susan Hill in her novel The Bird of Night, is an owlish, manic-depressive Scot named Francis Croft, aet. 33, who courts death imprisoned in the land of catatonia, an insanitarium of self where his nerve ends, always exposed, show themselves each to be more sensitive than a rice-weevil’s feeler. This isn’t really a novel. It’s a nervous breakdown. It’s a confession. Croft as a real character is totally unrealized, but, rather, thesis-wise, he’s shot to us right away in an indescribable shrillness and stays that way: a casebook barmy whose eccentric and perverse behavior stands as the single sine qua non of a genius in him we see nowhere else, certainly not in the snippets, of which we’re treated to samples, of his masterpiece, Janus. We just see Croft suffer, screech.

In a kind of reverse of James’s “The Aspern Papers,” Croft is protected from the world—which, true to type, of course, rudely seeks to burgle his letters, his diary, his soul—by a “guardian angel” figure, 34-year-old Harvey Lawson, scholar and Egyptologist, who has more patience than St. Monica and who, inexplicably (but I’ll accept love), assumes the role of wet nurse to the mad, suicidal poet, chronicling their mutual voyage to the end of night, which goes from Dorset, to Venice, to California, to a final bird sanctuary, as it were, called Schloss Vogel in Germany. Everywhere is death, of which the owl—perhaps I should have mentioned this sooner?—is an augur.