I came across The Bird of Night by Susan Hill in a Guardian interview with Eley Williams. Eley writes of the novel: “I had never read anything like it: a controlled psychological portrait of cruelty, devotion, and the terror of a mannered life. I truly think I trusted all people far less once I’d finished that novel, and loved them all more intensely.” Intrigued, it prompted me to go searching my local library catalogue for a copy.
The issue I encounter with Susan Hill’s work (and it is entirely of my own creation) is that I only knew her for her most famous piece, The Woman in Black. I have since unfairly pigeonholed her as a gothic horror writer, when in fact, the following two novels I have read by her (The Black Sheep and The Bird of Night) do not conform to this genre.
Although I have wrongfooted myself twice, I really enjoy her writing. She is now undoubtedly an author whose work I want to continue to explore.
On collection from the library, I found a very old edition from 1985. The pages are yellow and falling off the spine, and the book came bound with elastic bands to keep it all together. Inside is a wonderful collection of library stamps and tickets from 1985.
When reading The Bird of Night, its lack of gothic horror did not disappoint me, but rather intrigued me as to what I would encounter as the story progressed. I found it to be a tale of undulating emotional highs and lows, laced by mania and mental illness.
Harvey Lawson is an old man, recounting his life with Francis Croft, an eminent poet who is deeply, mentally unwell. The intimacy of their relationship is subtle, and my interpretation is that certainly they are life partners, devoted to one another. Francis lovingly calls Harvey ‘my dear’ and there are sweet moments of affection. Most telling is a moment of homophobic abuse they experience while in Venice, when Harvey realises their closeness has caught the attention of a disapproving local. The novel is set across the 1920s-30s and published in 1972. Taking these dates into account, I personally feel the conservatism around their relationship makes sense.
While undoubtedly devoted to Francis, there is an unhealthy co-dependency between him and Harvey. Francis’s illness makes life exhausting, depressing and full of worry, and yet Harvey is miserable and jealous when apart from him. I found Francis to be an enigmatic, troubled genius, and with it, selfish, priggish and often infuriating. That said, I couldn’t help but root for them to defy the odds, for Francis to recover, and for them to be happy and at peace. We ride the waves of mental illness, recovery and relapse. We understand the moral and ethical dilemmas Harvey faces as a carer to someone so fearful of hospitals and mental institutions.
I read The Bird of Night initially with surprise, for this is a different kind of horror that Hill writes about. However, I also read it with compassion and empathy and sadness, for these two men, clinging to each other, always hoping for recovery, until finally hope is gone.
