Fluttering throughout this ornithological novel are hawks, cranes, geese, lapwings, and a juvenile eagle, but it is the eponymous wallcreeper, Rudi, a mountain bird, who is the most intriguing character. In her slim debut novel – published in the UK alongside her second novel, Mislaid, and now out in a paperback edition – Nell Zink displays a great knack for fitting whole lifetimes into single sentences.
The narrator Tiff explains how one fateful day, during a birding expedition, her husband Stephen noticed the wallcreeper and swerved to avoid it: “I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage.” Enamoured with the wallcreeper (“the most wonderful bird”), Stephen takes it home. Tiff narrates the fraught aftermath of finding the bird and losing her baby: “It was a bodily distress. I had no way of putting it into words.” Yet Zink succeeds in putting into words the most inexpressible experiences.
The tension between domesticity and the wild rages throughout. The novel’s epigraph is from Ted Hughes’s poem Hawk Roosting’: “I kill where I please because it is all mine.” Zink also grapples with the rapaciousness of humans. The metaphor of flight is recurrent and Zink excels in exploring the restlessness of both birds and people: the couple release the wallcreeper back into the wild, but feel increasingly trapped. They relocate from America to Berne but the narrative also flits to Berlin and beyond as their relationship disintegrates, becoming an albatross around the neck. Tiff abandons being “a very dutiful wife”, and takes a series of lovers, including one who introduces her to Montenegrin folk rock – her favourite song happens to be called Wings (Who You Are?). Indeed, music plays an interesting role in the story and Stephen ships over his vinyl collection, seeking succour in songs after his beloved bird has gone.
“I only did things I felt strongly moved to do,” declares Tiff. The narrative is filled with issues that move both narrator and author, and sections are given over to environmental treatise. Indeed, it was Zink’s environmental concerns that led to her being published: after reading a New Yorker article by Jonathan Franzen about the slaughter of songbirds, she struck up a correspondence with him, and Franzen became her literary champion, encouraging her idiosyncratic voice.
The wallcreeper itself is killed off too quickly and the narrative at times hurtles too rapidly between scenes and settings, as Stephen grows increasingly flighty. But it is testament to Zink’s talent that she makes “breeding and feeding” mostly engrossing reading. With flashes of wit and insight, Zink powerfully evokes “the forces of nature”, making the reader marvel, too, at the forces of language.
The Wallcreeper is published by 4th Estate (£7.99). Click here to buy it for £5.99
