Book Review - Birds of Passage by Brian Castro

 Birds of Passage by Brian Castro

Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983        ISBN 0868611263

I have read some Brian Castro previous to tackling this, his first novel, and I have found his short allusive books to be thoughtful and interesting if not always entertaining in the generally accepted sense of that term.

Birds of Passage contains the intertwined stories of Shan and his descendent Seamus. Shan leaves China to find his fortunes on the Australian goldfields and is in turn shipwrecked, swindled, beaten and broken, eventually returning to his desolated village, but not before giving his European lover a son.

Seamus is an orphan, brought up to two alcoholic foster parents. He finds part of Shan's journal in the house his foster mother is living in, and he by turns becomes more and more immersed in the past until he tries to kill himself in Hill End, where his own and Shan's stories connect. Saved by his neighbour Anna, by the end of the book he is on the path back through the past into his own life.

Castro has packed a lot of meaning into this short book. Central is an investigation into what it means to be alien in your own culture. Seamus struggles with being identified as a "Ching Chong Chinaman" when he is truly Australian - he painfully teaches himself Chinese so that he can read Shan's journals, in which he discovers the casual brutality meted out to "Celestials" during the goldrush: Shan's friend Tzu is murdered by white men, and Shan sees his other acquaintances ruined by the way they were treated in Australia. Yet, like Seamus, Shan is an outsider in his own culture. He learns English, and eschews the base materialism of many of his countrymen. He takes a European lover, Mary, and has dreams of settling on the land. It is only when he kills to save his own life that he returns to China, and wonders how his son will get on in the new land.

Another theme in this book, and one central to Castro's oeuvre, is how people communicate (or fail to communicate) with each other. While Seamus develops a kind of mystical communication with Shan across time, as Shan does with "his reader", both Shan and Seamus struggle to communicate with those around them. Shan has the barrier of language that separates him from white folk and the barrier of sensibility that separates him from his fellow Chinese. Seamus struggles to communicate his feelings especially to those he loves - intriguingly two of the women he is attracted to in the book are dumb, as he himself becomes after his attempted suicide. Anna, who nurses him back to normality helps him re-discover his voice, as he helps her discover her own.

There are several moments throughout the  book where characters muse on the inadequacy of human interaction - "In the spiritual sense, once you say something, it is no longer significant. It's the same with love, only it's experience that most often stands its way. It denies love its true expression. When you can't express lover ideally, it languishes and wilts. When next you confront it, on the other side of experience, you find it alien; and yet it came from you, from your own soul."

In the end, it seems that both Shan and Seamus have failed to achieve what it was they set out to do - and yet it seems that they both have moved from a place of insecurity to one of acceptance, if not peace.

Birds of Passage was Castro's first novel - it won many accolades as have those that came after it. They were deserved - this is well-worth reading.