THE LANGUAGE OF GRIEF 

Review on Max Porter, Grief is The Thing With Feathers 

Max Porters Grief is The Thing With Feathers is not a story that is easily consumable. While the novella has received critical acclaim for its subversive, unconventional and unique narrative structure. It is also critiqued for its mundane and simplistic vocabulary. The story is about a man who has lost his wife and is left to care for his two boys when a crow arrives which may or may not be a figment of his imagination. Porter notes during his 5x15 discussion, that at the conception of the story, he envisioned three thematic bowls. In the first bowl he wished to tell a story “about siblings, about a lateral relationship, about the way that siblings, in this case two brothers, exchange stories, manipulate stories, use stories, remember, misremember, play little battles with stories and inflict little wounds on each other with stories.””On the right bowl” he adds, “ I’m going to put a dad, and I’m going to visit upon him something cataclysmic, the loss of his beloved.” “And in the middle bowl” he thought,” I need something very big something very dark to anchor this triptych, the very center of this story.” ...and upon the sudden cry of a black bird, he introduces The Crow. 

Porter admits to drawing a great deal of inspiration from poet laureate Ted Hughes Crow - a collection of hard hitting poetry told through the perspective of an omnipotent black bird. Both Hugh and Porter's crows are at times grotesque, malevolent, evil, but also beautiful. And while Hughes examines the different stages of humanity through the eyes of this ominous bird, Porter explores the state of grief through fragmented prose, famously described by its publisher Faber & Faber  as "part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief." "Grief," Porter writes, " is the thing with feathers," that is to say it is a bird, or perhaps a thing quite cable of taking flight, of leaving, or moving between seasons. "Grief is everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.” And what better way to give expression to this sentiment than through the use of anthropomorphism. Ultimately, one of the more captivating aspects of this novella is the language is uses to express grief.  

The story is presented as a kind of homage to the authors beloved poet Ted Hughes, with the protagonist struggling to write a book about the poet having suffered the sudden loss of his wife. Our first narrator, Dad, is introduced to the crow while attending to the door expecting to find guests offering gifts as a form of consolation. The protagonist describes these visits as "monstrous", as they seem emblematic of a dreadful continuity to life despite his grief, and in a sense pressure him meet the day. But when he opens the door this time, to his surprise, he is greeted by the loud CWAK of a crow. The ominous and insensitive nature of the bird speaks to him as if it were his intuition, or something frightening and disciplinary. The black beaked bird will encourage him to write, it will be the only foreign body with whom he can grieve ungracefully. Its presence speaks to his grief and the fragmented prose produced as a result. Porter's book is written in the language of this grief. It is broken and disjointed, it does not flow like a memoir, it has no chronological order. `his grief, like ours, is haphazard and visits upon him like waves - inconsistently, leaving and arriving without warning. The Crow insists on this morbid source of inspiration, stating that "Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.”

It is interesting that the title of Porter’s novella - Grief is The Thing With Feathers, is actually a spin on the title of Emily Dickenson’s poem - Hope is The Thing with Feathers. Though the author never makes any clear reference to this poem, he does acknowledge the influence of Emily Dickenson on his prose, beginning the book with her quote “THAT Love is all there is, Is all we know of Love; It is enough, the freight should be. Proportioned to the groove.” Emily Dickenson, infamous for on-going state of despair, seems to have demonstrated her attempts at grasping for light in the works Porter has chosen to reference. This makes it such that one could just as easily  substitute the word “Grief” with “Hope” in the novellas gothic title, it is in the end a story of hope, and a striving for normality in the face of sudden loss. The text along with its subtle references modestly displays the author's polymathic sensibility. This is especially evident in the buoyancy from which Porter’s crow meddles with the subject of grief. He writes:

“What good is a crow to a pack of grieving humans? A huddle. A throb.          A sore.                      A plug.                                   A gape.                                                A load. A gap. So, yes. I do eat baby rabbits, plunder nests, swallow filth, cheat death, mock the starving homeless, misdirect, misinform. Oi, stab it! A bloody load of time wasted. But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief.”

Grief in this extract, is once again inextricably linked with hope. The passage is both dark and playful, almost child-like. The Crow is both a product of the subconscious mind as well as a physical manifestation of hope. 

But perhaps it is the idea of faith in something intangible and the power of the imagination to guide one through a state of grief which speaks most directly to the hearts of readers. “Perhaps if Crow taught 'us' anything it was a constant balancing. For want of a less dirty word: faith.” Porter inadvertently draws a link between creativity and faith as well as its healing properties almost as if to eco a Jungian concept of individuation. He suggests that the only hope there is to retrieve from grief is in transferring the weight of ones emotions into the creation of something new. The subversive novella therefore takes on a more conventional structure towards its end as the boys shout "I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU and their voice was the life and song of their mother. Unfinished. Beautiful. Everything."