Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore review a marriage suffused with menace

Barry Unsworth, whose Sacred Hunger shared the 1992 Booker prize with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, mistrusted an addiction to historical minutiae when it came to evoking the past in fiction. “What matters,” he said, “is trying to get hold of the spirit of the age, what it was like to be alive in that age, what it felt like to be an ordinary person in the margins of history.”

Helen Dunmore would doubtless agree. From her debut, Zennor in Darkness, set in Cornwall during the first world war, to Exposure, her recent take on the cold war spy drama, she has carefully peeled back the public record to expose the private struggles of those whose lives are forged in the crucible of history, and in particular what she calls “the long shadows of war”. Her novels illuminate not only the suffering of these forgotten people but their small joys, the ties of family and of faith, the stubborn determination of individuals, even in the grimmest of circumstances, to hold onto the humanity that redeems us.

In Birdcage Walk, Dunmore explores what is, for her, new territory, the febrile days of the French Revolution and the Terror that followed it. Her approach is characteristically oblique. Lizzie Fawkes is a young woman living not in Paris but in Bristol. She has been raised among radicals: her feisty mother, Julia, widowed when Lizzie was an infant, is a passionate advocate of women’s rights in the Mary Wollstonecraft mould, while her stepfather Augustus writes rousing republican pamphlets. Both follow closely the reported progress of events in Paris, Augustus with zealous enthusiasm, Julia with a rising sense of unease as the murderousness of the mob is unleashed.

But for Lizzie the revolution has other consequences. Her husband, John Diner Tredevant, is a property developer who has borrowed heavily to construct a splendid terrace of houses set high into the steep hillside of Clifton, two hundred feet above the Avon. The location is a powerful metaphor: with France in turmoil, war looms and once-eager buyers are in retreat, reluctant to invest in uncertain times. As work on the houses slows and is finally abandoned, the futures of both the half-finished enterprise and its ambitious master-builder teeter on the brink of the abyss.

Like many of Dunmore’s novels, Birdcage Walk defies categorisation. The novel opens (after a brief and superfluous modern day prelude) with a man burying a dead body in a clearing in a wood, a blend of beauty and horror evoked with such breathtaking poetry that it haunts me still. This is no murder mystery but, just like the revolution across the Channel, the scene casts a shadow over everything that follows, suffusing the novel with an uneasy menace.

If the history, served up in newspaper articles, is sometimes a little heavy-handed, both Julia and John Tredevant are satisfyingly complex. Julia combines intelligence, humour and a powerful maternal instinct, while despite his bullishly capitalist impulses, Tredevant is sensitive and needy. His desire for Lizzie to conform to a wifely compliance is driven at least as much by his fear of abandonment as by convention and the desire to control.

Unsure of herself, Lizzie is caught between them, unable to reconcile their differences. She is unable to explain to John her mother’s bold idealism, lacking, by her own admission, her eloquence. Lizzie also can’t explain to her mother John’s stirring vision for a new city. She is impatient with what she calls “this shadow boxing with great events”. And yet, for all her indifference to politics, she too is constrained by circumstances beyond her control, bound into marriage at a time when a wife was her husband’s legal property. Her refuge, and her own small rebellion, is to take in her infant half-brother against John’s wishes.

Birdcage Walk does not reach the heights of Dunmore’s best work. While there is no doubting the grisly horror of the events unfolding in Paris, their effect on the novel’s protagonists is too often tangential, the  threat more theoretical than real. Touching as they sometimes are, the relentlessly domestic preoccupations of much of the middle part of the novel lack urgency, causing the pace to sag. That said, the novel offers many delights. Dunmore could not write an ugly sentence if she tried and she has an extraordinary gift for taking the ordinary and familiar and rendering them new. When Tredevant’s growing unpredictability once more tightens the narrative, forcing the story back into the ominous and unsettling territory where it first began, it is easy to see why she has earned a place among the finest writers of historical fiction working today.

Clare Clark’s latest novel is We That Are Left (Vintage). Birdcage Walk is published by Hutchinson. To order a copy for £14.24 (RRP £18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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