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Louise Doughty’s capability to produce complex, frequently problematic lead characters who keep our compassion is among her trademarks. A Bird in Winter, her tenth book, is another hectic thriller with a middle-aged female browsing male-dominated passages of power — this time British intelligence.
Heather follows her dad into “the Service”. After a short profession in the Women’s Royal Army Corps, quickly interrupted after she punches among her senior officers, Heather is approached by Richard Semple, her dad’s previous protégé, and register. Later she muses: “I didn’t actually like our government all that much. It was just that I was fiercely against governments who wanted to imprison their own citizens, torture them in basements or execute them without trial.”
She devotes her life to the Service, surrendering buddies, family and any possibility of a long-lasting relationship. In her fifties, Heather transfers to Birmingham to operate in a unit established by the Department of Standards to “catch dirty spies”. This is where her difficulties begin and she winds up on the run. Moving backward and forward in time, we discover Heather’s back-story, her nearness to her dad, who calls her Bird, and the quick however extreme relationship she creates in her twenties with Flavia, a fellow female soldier.
Two of Doughty’s books have actually already been adjusted for tv. Platform Seven (2019) will be on ITV later on this year and her bestseller Apple Tree Yard (2013) was developed into a four-part series for the BBC in 2017. A Bird in Winter feels as though it has actually been composed with a screen adjustment in mind. It’s skillfully structured and numerous chapters end on cliffhangers. Doughty utilizes simply adequate information to produce a vibrant local color as we follow Heather on her flight from Birmingham to Scotland and onwards to remote corners of Norway and Iceland. She increases stress with Heather’s growing anxiousness about being pursued: “the man they sent . . . a shadow, a shape, visible, then invisible in the way that a nocturnal creature is revealed then shrouded by the slipping and sliding of clouds across the moon.”
The insights Doughty provides us into Heather’s inner life and vulnerabilities guarantee we stay purchased her fate. Heather might have a high-powered job in intelligence however she experiences regular stress and anxieties with which we can determine — regret for stopping working to take her widowed mom on a journey to Margate or an unreasonable fury when purchasing a coffee takes too long. Despite her difficult outside, she yearns for connection with the couple of individuals she appreciates. We witness Heather facing a possibly deadly circumstance with authentic worry and, later on, humorously pondering the benefits and drawbacks of sleeping with a large, kindly bike service technician: “he’s a handsome potato of man but how much carbohydrate does any woman want?”
It’s Doughty’s ability at moving in between these various signs up — from the upsetting to the banal, from political intrigue to personal issue — and linking them with engaging passages of action, that makes her such a skilled author of mental thrillers.
A Bird in Winter by Louise Doughty Faber, £16.99, 368 pages
