But he recognizes the essential value of his feathered wisdom:

There is Dad, who, aches for the loss of his friend and lover, and in his uncertainty about the nature of his new role in his fractured little family, questions the possible delusional nature of the presence of Crow. This short novel blurs the lines between prose, poetry and drama. He will stay for as long as he is required. This surreal surrogate houseparent has arrived to ease, tease and prod the troubled family toward healing. Guiding him and his young sons as they struggle to make sense of a world and a family missing such a central figure-partner and parent-is a crude, boisterous, grandiose incarnation of Crow in all his mythological glory. The father is a Hughes scholar, fumbling his way through the completion of a manuscript about the poet’s crow poems in the disorienting aftermath of his wife’s death. These poems, composed primarily in a span of time bookended by the suicides of his wife, Sylvia Plath, and his partner, Assia Wevill, give inspiration to the corvid character, who inserts himself into the lives of the grieving family.

To appreciate the invention and spirit of Feathers, it is useful but not necessary, to have an acquaintance with Ted Hughes and his work Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. It would not have saved her, but it might have granted her the comfort of wings, even for a moment. Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter’s bravely unconventional novel about the impact of a woman’s sudden death on her husband and young sons, is a book that speaks to me-not as a bereaved child, my parents were in their eighties and ailing-but in the loss of my friend Ulla, who ended her life burdened by an unremittent depression and her own private, unresolved griefs. And yet, no two griefs, no two losses are alike. I carry more, I am a walking inventory of grief, but the three “expected” griefs are those that I, and others, anticipate I lost both of my parents and one of my closest friends within the span of two months last summer. I am carrying three griefs-three “conventional” griefs, if there is such a thing. Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint

Grief has feathers