Book Review: The earthquake bird

The Earthquake Bird by Susanna Jones

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A story involving Lucy Fly, Teiji the photographer and noodle cook, Lily Bridges the superficial girl on the bounce from a pressured relationship, various police officers and a septuagenarian string quartet as well as the families of each.

Lucy is a complex character, a product of a difficult family with bullying brothers. The first-person narrative brings the story alive and the details of her upbringing as well as the immense attention to detail in the descriptions of situations and people provide great insights into what it feels like to go through the experiences she had. I really felt for her. There was an unusual stylistic device of sometimes switching to third person to describe herself, almost as if she had multiple personalities - but that was a tease; a red herring, as it happened. I loved the way she did not tell the police she was in interpreter at her first interview about Lily's disappearance; very English - "I wasn't asked"...

Her life as an interpreter and her hobbies that involved her in the local community, the string quartet, were very typical for the kind of person she was. She reminded me of how my wife would join local music groups as her first job after university took her to live in various towns for a few months each time.

I loved the way that Lucy first met Teiji, the photographer with whom she developed a relationship: "He was leaning over a puddle, apparently taking photographs of it. Water slid over his hair and face but he seemed not to notice. His camera clicked and he moved fluidly to the other side of the puddle. I stared. He appeared to be made of water and ice. I had never seen a man with such delicate fingers, sharp brittle shoulder-blades, transparent brown eyes. He glinted in the neon dark more sharply than the vast ice sculptures of the Sapporo Festival I had marvelled at when I first came to Japan. He was an exhibit of the Tokyo night and so beautiful that I couldn’t walk past him." This graphic description of seeing his reflection first, was like a frame from a manga comic. Very memorable. I liked his troubled mind and the way he had a job in his uncle's noodle shop. Prosaic details like this reminded me of all the 1930s detective novels I used to read; Rex Stout, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, Raymond Chandler and so on. Susanna Jones had that eye for detail as well as a sense of foreboding that made it easy to think the worst of her lead character.

Lily Bridges whimps into Lucy's life through mutual acquaintances and, like Lucy, I took an instant dislike to her. As the relationship grew and Lucy developed more of an almost friendly interaction with Lily (albeit an over-dependent one), Teiji found it difficult to control his primitive urges and moved his attention over to Lily. Not a good move at all, which was bound to end in tears.

The deaths around Lily were strange and disturbing. It was intriguing to see how, eventually, everyone involved from police, to family and string quartet, acknowledged that she might have a sense of guilt, but no one blamed her for simply living her life as best she could. Ultimately, the story is a coming-of-age kind of thing as she finally achieves a more mature adulthood in which she is more comfortable with who and what she is.

I really enjoyed the intrigue, the narrative, the attention to detail and the ultimate resolution of all the loose ends. A masterful book. It has been made into a movie, which I watched as soon as I could. I enjoyed watching that, as well, but the format of movies has to involve slipping a lot of narrative detail that makes this kind of story so absorbing.



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Quotations

When I closed my Facebook account, I downloaded all the data that they had on me. One part that I wanted to preserve was my list of favourite quotations. I am posting them here for now, as I want to be sure I do not lose them:

"Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality - call it an alternate reality - to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognise as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created in our consciousness, and it is the maintenance of this chain which produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist. But something can happen to sever that chain and we are at a loss. What is real? Is reality on this side of the break in the chain? Or over there, on the other side?" (Haruki Murukami, 'South of the border, west of the sun', p176.

Making money isn't hard in itself ... What is hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting your life to. (Carlos Ruiz Zafón in The Shadow of the Wind)

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind (George Orwell)

You have to be an intellectual to believe such nonsense. No ordinary man could be such a fool (George Orwell)

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is (Chuck Reid)

Cry 'havoc' and let slip the dogs of war... (Shakespeare)

Eliminate management by objectives. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership. (W. Edwards Deming)

It is a fundamental fallacy to believe that it is possible by the elaboration of machinery to escape the necessity of trusting one's fellow human beings (Clement Attlee)

Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi (Publius Terentius Afer)

Do not become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin (Ivan Petrovich Pavlov)

I don’t care about posterity, that’s what I’d like to be remembered for. (Banksy)

It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars. (Noam Chomsky) (Incidentally, what really worries me is that those same people are now running our Universities. Degrees are now products. Graduates are now products. Why do we tolerate this?)