Review of Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter – A Brave View of Bereavement | Audio books

toLess than a week after his wife’s sudden death, a grieving man opens his door to a giant crow that scoops him into his suite and says, “I’m not leaving until you don’t need me anymore.” The man is still in shock, facing the prospect of raising his two young sons alone. Altaïr, wandering around the family’s apartment at night, notices a house in “deep mourning, every surface of a dead mother, every crayon, jar, coat, well covered with a film of grief.” On that first visit, “the man woke up and did not see me despite his shock.”

First published in 2015 and since adapted into a play and film, Grief is the Thing with Feathers is an innovative and sharply observed novel by Max Porter that uses poetry, dialogue, and the supernatural to examine a family grappling with the loss of a wife and mother who was “busy living, and then gone away.” In a story that switches between the points of view of “Dad,” “The Boys,” and “The Crow,” we learn that the man is a writer working on a book about the poet Ted Hughes called “A Crow on the Couch.”

This is a new recording with Russell Tovey as narrator. Deftly navigating the book’s shifting, fragmented style, the actor delivers a bravura performance in which he’s as compassionate and menacing as a crow and poignantly captures the devastation of a father who observes how “moving on, as a concept, is for fools, because any reasonable person knows that grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush.”

Available via Faber, 1 hour 52 minutes

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