A review by moonpix
The Birds and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier

4.0

I thought both Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel were stronger than this collection as a whole but there was still a lot to love, especially the titular story and The Little Photographer. I’ve been in a short story phase lately, there’s just something uniquely fun about reading a full collection and finding the thematic through-lines between each piece. This work is also an important part of the Isak Dinesen/Shirley Jackson/Angela Carter legacy of gothic short stories by women and so it was interesting to think about the through-lines across all of their works as well.

The comparison to Dinesen’s Winter Tales is especially resonant here, for despite many of the stories historical settings both collections are clearly reactions to the recent world war. This work in particular gives insight into the psychology of post-war Britian— characters struggle with forces beyond their control, and are consumed by repressed guilt. There are many crimes that take place in these stories, as well as some burials and attempted burials. The Birds and The Old Man, the stories that book-end this collection, along with burials also involve seagulls and swans. The role of animals and the ancient ritual of burial lends the whole book a sacrificial, fabulistic quality. In the context of the war, these fables do not have a traditional moral lesson, but rather seem to ask if it is possible to move on knowing that you have done wrong.

Interestingly, this work is also deeply concerned with the power of the landscape, in what after the technological destruction of the war could be seen as a romantic, backward facing turn. But these natural disasters are often directly compared to the effects of the fighting— “It was, Nat thought, like air raids in the war. No one down this end of the country knew what the Plymouth folk had seen and suffered. You had to endure something yourself before it touched you”. In the aftermath of the technology of war the landscape gains more power, and in its uneven distribution of punishment it further alienates people from each other. In fact it seems as if the deeply repressed guilt over the war has been manifested in this new landscape.

For the characters it then follows that the only hope of escaping guilt and regret is if the consequences of violence are returned into the land through burial. After one such burial two characters feel a sense of relief: “It was both a requiem and a benediction. An atonement, and a giving of praise. In their strange way they knew they had done evil, but now it was over … they were free to be together again”. But du Maurier questions this resolution, for another story ends with a character leaving the site where she murdered her lover, writing in a delicious echo of Rebecca that “they turned out of the hotel grounds into the road. Behind her lay the headland, the hot sands, and the sea. Before her lay the long straight road to home and safety. Safety…?”. Even if you have acknowledged wrongdoing, even if you have buried the evidence out of sight, and even if you have left this landscape behind, guilt can still follow you.

“When he reached the beach below the headland he could scarcely stand, the force of the east wind was so strong. It hurt to draw breath, and his bare hands were blue. Never had he known such cold, not in all the bad winters he could remember. It was low tide. He crunched his way over the shingle to the softer sand and then, his back to the wind, ground a pit in the sand with his heel. He meant to drop the birds into it, but as he opened up the sack the force of the wind carried them, lifted them, as though in flight again, and they were blown away from him along the beach, tossed like feathers, spread and scattered, the bodies of the fifty frozen birds. There was something ugly in the sight. He did not like it. The dead birds were swept away from him by the wind.”