Review: The Spectator Bird (Wallace Stegner)

In the first few pages I thought we were back in ‘Angle of Repose’ territory with a man looking back on his life, and I guess on some levels we are. However ‘The Spectator Bird’ takes a different direction. Stegner is skilled at setting down layers of soil and dust and sand. Seventy year old Joe Allston, a retired literary agent lives with his wife Ruth, and they are chugging along, Joe watching the changes of old age on his neighbours and himself, when out of the blue he receives a postcard from a friend from the past. The memory sends him back to a series of diaries he made when twenty years earlier he and his wife spent several months in Denmark, the place where his mother originated from.

From this point there are two stories running, the story of now, as Ruth persuades Joe to read to her those notebooks each night, she sitting snug in their bed, and he sitting in his usual reading chair. The second story is the story contained in those notebooks of the complex intertwining of lives and histories as they become ensnared in the life of their landlady in Denmark, and coincidences occur that wind the history of Joe’s family with hers.

In the here and now, Ruth is on a mission to find out the truth of something that she never knew for sure, can she find out? Will it change anything if she does? In the past, and the past within that past, there are traumatic discoveries, gains and losses that I don’t feel I want reveal. Each reader should discover those twists and turns for themselves. But what I will say is that sometimes the journey made me a little breathless.

Both ‘Angle of Repose’ and ‘The Spectator Bird’ were written by Stegner in later life, and testify to the intensity and acute detail he achieved in describing the life of an aging person. The fragility and the strengths, the richness of life and the frailness of the body. And in most instances the determination to go on. To continue to that final, inevitable moment.

With both these novels, very shortly into them, I knew that they would be novels I would be reading again. I am an inveterate re-reader, and possibly 10-17% of books I will read again, but very few leave me knowing I will re-read them when I am barely half way through them.