Mythical, slippery, shapeshifting: Grief is the Thing With Feathers transforms tragedy into literature

Max Porter lost his father when he was just six years old. He has described his first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, as “a love letter to my dad”.

A huge bestseller when it was published in 2015, it is one of many books in literary history that deal with grief – whether it is the author’s own experience, or a grief observed. It tells the story of the husband and sons of a woman who has died suddenly. The three are not coping with the shock and absence of this bereavement. Into this situation comes a most unlikely character: Crow.

We have been alerted to this possibility. The title of the book is adapted from Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope” is the thing with feathers; and the epigraph is also taken from her poetry: “That Love is all there is…”.

Borrowing Dickinson’s habit of editing her poems by hand, Porter crosses out “love” and replaces it with “crow”.

Crow’s presence is reinforced in the first line of the first page, when a feather appears on the boys’ pillow. This is not just any feather: it is “big, black”. It is only the first of the big, black feathers that appear, confoundingly, in various parts of the house.

It is, of course, a crow’s feather, and Crow himself appears in the next chapter, bursting into the story with a “stench” and “a crack and a whoosh”.

The thing with feathers has arrived. Crow tells the grieving, embittered Dad that he is there to fill their need. He lifts Dad into the air and promises, or threatens, “I won’t leave until you don’t need me any more.”

It turns out Crow is the closest thing to a carer the little family will have. And they badly need a carer. As Crow observes,

the whole place was heavy mourning, every surface dead Mum, every crayon, tractor, coat, welly, covered in a film of grief. Down the dead Mum stairs, plinkety plink curled claws whisper, down to Daddy’s recently Mum-and-Dad’s bedroom.

Fragments and metaphors

This short book – it’s only 114 pages long – gives voice to the family and their sorrows in an impressive example of how to write about tragedy. I find it difficult to categorise, though. Critics have called it, variously, a novel, a verse novel, a prose poem, magical realism, formal experimentation, and a play for voices.

Reviewer Lucy Scholes usefully describes it as “a beguiling literary hybrid”, a book that is “as slippery and shapeshifting as Crow himself”.

There is no narrator, but simply three voices: Boys, Dad and Crow. Each offers a monologue – a sort of soliloquy – taking turns at the microphone, as it were. There is only indirect dialogue, because, like characters in a Samuel Beckett play, they speak to the audience, and not to each other. Each talks about his (they’re all male) experiences or anxieties or observations; they may tell us what one of the others has said or done, but they do not perform together on the stage.

This draws attention to two key issues. The first is that the book performs, rather than simply describes, the experience of grief. There is, for so many people in this situation, a sense of overwhelming isolation and absence. Dad makes this clear:

The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers […] she was simply busy living, and then she was gone […] And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday. I will stop finding her hairs. I will stop hearing her breathing.

Along with this absence is the difficulty of finding coherent expression. How do we articulate such pain? Maybe as Porter does here: in fragments, vague gestures, repetition; and, as writer Kirsty Gunn suggests, in “random memories, thoughts, scraps of conversations”.

The second issue is that Dad is a Ted Hughes scholar, contracted to write a new book on what is arguably Hughes’ most famous poetic work, Crow.

Hughes’ Crow is a trickster, a shapeshifter, an expert in language, a product of myth, and a metaphor for grief. Porter’s Crow operates in the same way: he is playful, often very funny, often violent, sometimes tender – especially with the boys. And he is blunt about what he is and how he functions:

I was friend, excuse, deus ex machina, joke, symptom, figment, spectre, crutch, toy, phantom, gag, analyst and babysitter. […] I’m a template […] A myth to be slipped in.

Is he real? On the one hand, of course not. He is the shape of grief, a metaphor Dad clings to as he writes his book, as he cares for his boys, as he mourns his wife. He guides Dad through memories and into anticipation of future events; and as we watch, Dad begins to re-emerge under Crow’s direction.

On the other hand, of course Crow is real. He scatters feathers; he leaves “little squitty shits in places I knew he’d never clean”. The boys listen to him practise his speeches in the bathroom “where he often is because he likes the acoustics”. They hear him fighting with Dad, all “cronks, barks, sobs, a weird gamelan jam of broken father sounds and violent bird calls”.

Crow remains real to them, even as adults, men with their own families:

I tell tales of our family friend, the crow. My wife shakes her head. She thinks it’s weird that I fondly remember family holidays with an imaginary crow, and I remind her that it could have been anything, could have gone any way, but something more or less healthy happened. We miss our Mum, we love our Dad, we wave at crows.

To be real and imagined; to be grieving and able to function; to be poem and prose: this little book deals with such in-between states. By the end, when Crow leaves, his work done, and the Boys and Dad scatter Mum’s ashes, we are left not with knowledge about grief, or about Ted Hughes, or about giant crows, but with a gentle resonance.

It’s not surprising this book launched a significant writing career. Grief is the Thing with Feathers, published in 2015 and winner of the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize, was followed in 2019 by Lanny, another book animated by the fantastical – and by grief, loss and hope.

Porter’s third book The Death of Francis Bacon (2021), a book of fragments of that artist’s last days, again presses up against the edges of what writing can do. His most recent work Shy (2023) is a portrait of an adolescent youth who fails and is failed by society.

Porter’s stories are of people on the margins, people struggling against adversities. He tells those tales in fragments, flickering images, surprising swirls of language and wit.

But Grief is the Thing with Feathers remains the book that has captured the public imagination. It has been adapted for stage – by Enda Walsh, starring Cillian Murphy at the Barbican in London, and again, directed by Simon Phillips, due to open at Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney this weekend. Its next public outing is as the movie The Thing with Feathers, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, scheduled for release in November.

Whether a book, play or movie, Grief is the Thing with Feathers is well worth the price of admission.

Jen Webb has received funding from the Australian Research Council.