It has a tenuous, momentary feel, as if one were reading a Turner painting. Increasingly ill as she worked on this book, she observes in its afterword that 'under such a growing shadow,' the novel 'cannot help being full of a sharper light, rather as a landscape becomes brilliantly distinct in the last sunlight before a storm.' That sharp light illuminates the canvas of Birdcage Walk and gives it a charged radiance. From the start, Birdcage Walk has the command of a thriller as we keep company with John Diner Tredevant, an 18th-century property developer building a magnificent terrace in Clifton, high. The characters are thoughtful, complex and irritating sometimes they just talk about ideas.
And why should it? Why narrow the scope of what a novel can do? The plot meanders, surprises. In this and other ways, Birdcage Walk defies and includes a number of genres it steadfastly refuses to be one thing. Birdcage Walk is a historical novel with an unusual beginning. Occasionally, and for no apparent reason, she slips into the present tense. Book reviews: A Dangerous Crossing, About Last Night and more BIRDCAGE WALK by Helen Dunmore Hutchinson, 16.99 Helen Dunmore is prolific, her reach is wide both in themes and historical settings. Birdcage Walk is not a novel in the form of a diary, a memoir, a letter or an internal monologue Lizzie’s voice comes out of the air. Like Du Maurier, Dunmore has the ability to evoke a sense of place and to write passages. There’s no device or subtext to her story. Indeed, in its assurance, rapidity and narrative zest, Birdcage Walk might be a Daphne Du Maurier novel. Lizzie Fawkes is a naïve young woman, but she’s not a naïve narrator.
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