It’s 1988, and Sunday, a woman with autism, is living in a close-knit but sometimes unfeeling part of the Lake District. Having inherited her parents’ house, she has crafted an independent life, and is bringing up her headstrong teenage daughter, Dolly, who yearns for independence from the family nest.
Into this world come the glamorous, unpredictable Vita and her husband Rollo, a couple who eschew domesticity for extravagant suppers involving champagne and antipasti from Harrod’s. They arrive in Sunday and Dolly’s town for the summer, and take the house next door, whereupon Vita, with the blithe confidence of her class, starts to inveigle herself into her neighbours’ lives.
Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s wonderful debut novel, All the Little Bird-Hearts, longlisted for the Booker Prize, is sharply evocative of both motherhood and how British society treats people with disabilities. Lloyd-Barlow herself is autistic, and she’s interested in privilege, class and confidence, and how they can be used to exert malign influence over the vulnerable. For Sunday initially finds Vita compelling. There’s her confidence: while Sunday scrupulously observes the diktats of an Edith Ogilvy etiquette book, Vita is more likely to be found smoking on the doorstep in a ballgown. Insouciant and charming, she begins to stay for sleepovers, turning up in her pyjamas and renaming both mother and daughter: Dolly becomes “Dolls”, Sunday becomes “Wife”.
There’s also the delicate way in which the latter manages Sunday’s autistic traits. At their first meeting, Sunday reflects that Vita’s “surety” seems “like perfume… I breathed it in”. Her new friend’s expressively mobile face and dramatic delivery allow Sunday to read her emotions in a way she usually cannot. Yet this sudden intimacy is underpinned by danger, because Vita desires children of her own – and beneath the waspish disregard for social mores, there lurks a desperation and sense of entitlement to have Dolly to herself.
The novel’s depiction of motherhood is often bleak. Sunday’s own mother treated her with incomprehension and disregard, even blaming her for Sunday’s sister’s premature death. Her colleague, David, a gentle young man who’s also deaf, suffers his parents making no accommodations at all for his disability, to the point of refusing to “sign” for him. And then there are the inhabitants of the local children’s home, which Rollo plans to redevelop – these abandoned children will be scattered amongst foster carers as if they were so much collateral damage.
Everywhere in All the Little Bird-Hearts, those with privilege, whether this be financial, on account of their beauty, or through their being neurotypical, seek to take what belongs to others, and do it without concern. Sunday’s own parenting, for instance, may be tenderly devoted, but it’s easily dismissed by the community at large – and, tragically, by Dolly herself.
Throughout the novel, Lloyd-Barlow’s prose sings, and has real acuteness of observation. To be cast out from a world of performative emotion, she suggests, is for Sunday to gain a sincerity and strength of feeling that’s sorely lacking in many of the novel’s more socially successful characters. In spite of her limited ability to perform or express feeling, it’s Sunday who feels more deeply than the rest. As she says of Dolly, “my love for her remains constant… it is more, certainly, than conjuring polite and pleasing lies for onlookers.” Yet Sunday is often overpowered and ignored by others, and has to struggle on regardless. All the Little Bird-Hearts is a beautiful, bittersweet debut: nothing it offers is trite.
All the Little Bird-Hearts is published by Tinder at £18.99. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Books
