I opened my eyes and it was still dark and everything was crackling, rustling. I will give you every penny I own just as long as you don’t wake the boys.’ The hallway was pitch black and freezing cold and I thought, ‘What kind of world is it that I would be robbed in my home tonight?’ And then I thought, ‘Frankly, what does it matter?’ I thought, ‘Please don’t wake the boys, they need their sleep. There was a crack and a whoosh and I was smacked back, winded, onto the doorstep. No shape or light, no form at all, just a stench. There were no streetlights, bins or paving stones. I climbed down the carpeted stairs into the chilly hallway and opened the front door. Her husband, a somewhat nerdy literary critic, is writing a book on the crow in Ted Hughes’ poetry entitled Ted Hughes’ Crow on the Couch: A Wild Analysis and that is an obvious source for the crow-character who appears thus: The novel – is it even a novel? – revolves around the family dragged apart by a woman, mother and wife. And that itself is divided between Dad, Boys and the eponymous Crow who arrives as… what exactly? A symbol? A metaphor? A nightmare? A delusion? A nanny? It is literary and visceral, erudite and scatological, mythic and domestic at the same time.ĭeath and grief are such massive topics that you expect a weighty tome to contain them. And has the vividness and opacity of a nightmarish dreamscape.
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