3.0 out of 5 stars
A fitting finale for Helen Dunmore's fans
ByMaggie on November 8, 2017
Format: Hardcover
This is a dark and twisty book with many layers. As Helen Dunmore's last book, and looking at other reviewers' opinions, you can love it or hate it. I found it hard to get into, and thought that perhaps if I were more familiar with the setting and its local history, it might have been more engaged. For me, the afterword was the very best part, almost had me in tears. A good friend felt the same way. However, the author had been a Patroness of our local Literary Festival, and this work was discussed recently at this year's festival; many of the attendees very much loved the book. So, my conclusion is that if you like Helen Dunmore's other books, you will love this one!

Lizzy Fawkes has a close relationship with her mother, Julia, who has worked all her life for the rights of common men. She revolted against her family’s guidance, though, in the choice of her husband, John Diner Tredevant, a property developer. Julia thinks him too concerned with money, while he thinks Julia’s support of the French revolution is naive. Unfortunately, because Lizzy was so adamant to have John, or Diner as he prefers to be called, she cannot confide to her mother her occasional doubts, as Diner behaves in a controlling manner.

Readers already know that at the beginning of the novel, a man murdered a woman and buried her in the woods near the gorge of the Avon River. Diner is building his homes in Bristol overlooking that gorge, and we slowly come to fear that he may have murdered his first wife, Lucie.

With the success of the revolution comes the threat of war with France, and buyers back out of their agreements to purchase Diner’s houses. Diner’s behavior becomes erratic.

This novel is a real page turner. It makes the fourth Dunmore novel I’ve read, each one better than the last. It builds up a lot of suspense as you wonder what Lizzie’s fate will be.

This is not a tale of the French Revolution (why did the publisher chose to put that first in the blurb?) but rather about a group of people in Bristol in 1790. It's a character driven novel and some might find it slow but oh what characters! Lizzie thinks she's going to have one sort of marriage when she commits to Diner but circumstances change and it's very different than what she expected. Economic and political problems abound as do abuse. This is classic Dunmore, who will be greatly missed. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. Try this for a good historical read.

Re-reading the blurb after reading the book I have to say it is a close to perfect synopsis, so I’m not going to ruin it by remaking it I’m just going to give it to you verbatim;

“It is 1792 and Europe is seized by political turmoil and violence. Lizzie Fawkes has grown up in Radical circles where each step of the French Revolution is followed with eager idealism. But she has recently married John Diner Tredevant, a property developer who is heavily invested in Bristol’s housing boom, and he has everything to lose from social upheaval and the prospect of war. Soon his plans for a magnificent terrace built above the two-hundred-foot drop of the Gorge come under threat. Tormented and striving Diner believes that Lizzie’s independent, questioning spirit must be coerced and subdued. She belongs to him: law and custom confirm it, and she must live as he wants—his passion for Lizzie darkening until she finds herself dangerously alone.”

The only thing that would have improved that blurb for me was if I had kept it in mind when I started reading the book! As this book came to me through NetGalley about 3 months before it’s paperback release was due I straight away popped it in my ‘to be read soon’ but then didn’t get round to it for two months as I had others I wanted to review first. Then when I picked it up and started reading I got drawn in straight away to the prologue… but actually the prologue isn’t really relevant to the story itself. In fact I would recommend you skip it or read it at the end.

Other than that this book is excellent. As soon as you start reading you feel a sense of unease and a creeping certainty that danger is near to Lizzie that stays with you regardless of the glittering political distractions and security of her family.

This is how historical fiction should be. There is a conviction about the times that envelope the reader allowing you to feel as if you are there living through them with the characters. You feel the weight of the mud sucking at you as you try to walk, feel dizzied by the depths of the river crashing through the gorge below, feel the sting of the wind and the warmth of the hearth.

The characters are well formed and the twists when they come are surprising but believable. I left it feeling I understood Georgian England better and respected the people of the time more.

Four Bites

NB I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley in return for an honest review. The BookEaters always write honest reviews.

This is my first novel by Helen Dunmore, a well-known British author of historical fiction.  This was, in fact, her final book, as she died this summer of cancer at the age of 64.  Her obituary in The Guardian notes that:

She knew she was dying only at the editing stage but suggested, in an afterword, that she must have known subliminally because the novel was “full of a sharper light, rather as a landscape becomes brilliantly distinct in the last sunlight before a storm”.
Birdcage Walk is about an 18th century family in Bristol, during the time of the French Revolution.  Lizzie is married to Diner, a housing developer who hopes to build his fortune on a “terrace” of new homes.  Lizzie is the daughter of Julia Fawkes, a writer and radical feminist.  She’s free-spirited, like her mother, so much so that she’s chosen to defy her mother and enter into an early marriage.

To Lizzie, Diner is passionate and exciting when they meet, but she feels constrained now that they are married.  Diner expects his wife to live within the confines of the home he’s built for her.  He disapproves of her need for freedom, and her closeness with her radical mother.

At the same time, Lizzie is troubled by her husband’s first marriage.  She feels she’s competing with the ghost of Lucy, the first wife.  Although she doesn't want to ask, she begins to feel Diner is hiding things from her.

As historical fiction, I found this book gripping and informative.  I don’t think I’ve read a book that looks at the French Revolution through the eyes of British citizens of the time.  They are worried about the impact of the Revolution on their own economy and political stability.  They cheer for the cause of equality, but are concerned about the growing violence.  And the political upset has the danger of dividing neighbor from neighbor – Paris is not very far away.

At the same time, much of this story felt relevant today.  I could really appreciate Lizzie’s turmoil.  She’s not a writer like her mother, and she’s trying to find her own path.  She loves her mother but doesn’t necessarily follow her mother’s politics.  She dislikes her mother’s husband and wishes her mother could appreciate the husband she’s chosen.  Unfortunately -- as happens much too often -- Diner's possessiveness forces her to choose between increasingly separate circles: her husband and her family.  

There’s also an interesting subtext to this story.  The book begins with a modern-day narrator who comes across Julia’s gravestone.  The stone’s inscription suggests that Julia was an influential writer of her time, yet the narrator can find out very little about her, only her husband who was known to write political pamphlets.  So while Lizzie is the storyteller here, it is her mother we are truly curious about.

I have mixed feelings about the book’s ending, which I don’t think does justice to the complex issues and characters that Dunmore describes.

Still, as both a work of historical fiction, and an interesting portrayal of a woman caught between family and marriage, this was a fascinating book, and one I thoroughly enjoyed.

Note: I received a complimentary copy of this novel from NetGalley and publisher Grove Atlantic.  The book will be released on November 7, 2017.

The book gets off to a promising start with an interesting prologue about an old gravestone. The book then goes back in time to the later 1700s and I'm afraid I found it rather slow. I didn't really like any of the characters and nothing seemed to be happening. By halfway I was ready to give it up but the story finally picked up and I did get into it the end although saying that I wouldn't want to read it again or would I recommend it to a friend! The book however is well written.

I received this book for free from Netgalley. This did not influence my review.

Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore is an unusual book. A historical novel that is melancholy, gothic, and tense, it is introduced with an old-fashioned historical note, followed by a contemporary prelude in which a middle-aged widower out walking his dog comes across a ruined tombstone in a bedraggled old graveyard. He is intrigued by the inscription and attempts to discover the story behind it. The stone was put up in 1793, dedicated to a Julia Elizabeth Fawkes, whose writings, according to the dedication, were much admired. The widower’s attempt is thwarted by a paucity of information. This is the segue into a story that is actually about Julia’s daughter, Lizzie. The widower never reappears.

Although the introduction seemed a bit clunky at first, it does emphasize the author’s point about historical voices, particularly women’s voices, being lost to us.

Lizzie is the daughter of an early feminist radical. Lizzie loves her mother, barely tolerates her stepfather, and has bonded with her mother’s sole servant, Hannah, who helped raise her. However, Lizzie is no longer a child, though she remains as innocent as one. She falls in love with and marries a builder/property developer, Diner Tredevant.

The book blurb emphasizes the historical and political aspects of the novel. It is set during the time of the French Revolution. However, the characters are located in England and all news from abroad is second hand. The political upheaval is background for the novel and never rises to primary importance. Lizzie’s mother’s radical circle believes in the goals of the Revolution yet they are distressed, to varying degrees, by the violence. Ripples, primarily economic, affect Lizzie and her husband. With war impending, no one will buy Diner’s luxury homes.

The plot centers on the relationship between Lizzie and Diner. It is clear from the book’s opening chapters that Diner is a dangerous man. Their marriage is a claustrophobic one. Lizzie remains devoted to her family even as Diner tries pulling her away. As his development project fails (and it seemed doomed to fail even before the French troubles sapped the economy further), he becomes gloomier and scarier. Trapped and increasingly isolated, Lizzie doesn’t know all that the reader knows, so there is a constant undercurrent of suspense.

Dunmore’s writing is lovely and the plot moves at a steady pace, building to a frightening climax. I couldn’t guess which way the story would go. I requested the book based on the blurb, and while the book does not deliver exactly what the blurb promises, what it does deliver is even better.

Set in the late 18th century, Lizzie marries a property developer who is building a grand terrace on the Gorge at Clifton. However, events in France bring about the end of the property boom and Diner slides into bankruptcy and despair. Does not leave you on a high, however, an excellent read.

When Julia Fawkes, radical writer, dies after childbirth, her adult daughter Lizzie is left bereft. Newly married to a widower, Diner, Lizzie has to support her husband and raise her half-brother with only the help of her servant Philo. She comes into contact with a young poet but her suspicious husband thinks that more is going on than a mere friendship. Meanwhile Diner's business is collapsing, he has invested in the building of a row of houses in Bristol but the French Revolution means that no-one is interested in buying.

This is such a subtlety written book that both the minutiae of everyday Georgian life seems so much more important than the cataclysmic events across the channel and yet the ramifications are felt deeply. At one level the story is that of a young woman who discovers secrets about her husband that lead her into danger. At another level the radical followers of Thomas Paine are powerless to support their French friends as chaos reigns. The only jarring note for me was the modern day introduction. Whilst I know it was there to set the scene and introduce the reader to Julia Fawkes as a writer it was never revisited and felt superfluous.

I loved this book - a great story set during an interesting time in history.

I was surprised how much I liked this, after knowing nothing about it and not having any idea what to expect. It has a great old gothic suspense to it- similar to Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel and Rebecca. I loved guessing at the murder and wondering when and how the characters would come upon the same realization. The author successfully tucked little bits of history into a great story full of great characters. I really got into the story and it put me into the perfect mood for Halloween. I was on the edge waiting to find out what would happen.

I liked the book despite its leaving many questions unresolved. The book reminded me at times of lesser known books by Daphne du Maurier. The action takes place in England during the French revolution.
Lizzie's mother Julia Fawkes is a radical. These radicals want to end the class system in England and they closely watched by the British authorities. From a distance, they watch the revolution in France..

While Lizzie is attached to her mother, she marries John Diner Tredevant a property developer with big plans. He is at odds with Lizzie's mother and the radicals.

I wished the novel had stopped here. The book raises interesting questions while not answering them. Who becomes a radical and why? The novel starts but telling us that Julia Fawkes while well known in her time has been forgotten. We never find out the answer of why she was forgotten. The daughter Lizzie while very fond of her mother seems to want a different kind of life from her mother and one that is more materialistic and in the mainstream of society.

However, as the novel progresses the people become more stereotypically good or bad people. I wish the novel more stuck to the issue of radicals and how they relate to the community about them.

While it was not a perfect book, it held me interest and I enjoyed it.

I received a free copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.

A well written, page turner.

Helen Dunmore — queen of suspended dread. The reader knows that something bad has happened and fears that the bad will happen again. Lizzie and Diner are interesting, complicated characters, whom I struggled to understand. They exist within a fascinating historical framework, with the shadows of the French Revolution hanging over England, and the mixed fear and hubris of the Bristol building boom.

I am not sure what I think about this book. It's the first one I have read by Helen Dunmore and I am not sure that it would prompt me to read other books by her.
it took me a long time to get into and I had to really work hard to finish it.
The story starts in today with the finding of a gravestone which prompts the finder to research the person's grave. Leap back in time to find out. The story then focuses on the daughter of said gravestone holder who was a writer. The story seemed disjointed to me and was hard to keep up.

Set in a period of political upheaval in Europe, Birdcage Walk is a multi-layered novel that provides an intimate and, at times, troubling picture of a marriage seen through the eyes of Lizzie Tredevant. Lizzie’s motivation for marriage to John Diner Tredevant is complicated: part passion and, seemingly, part desire for a place of her own following her mother’s remarriage. However, her mother, Julia, remains an influential figure in Lizzie’s life.

Lizzie is Diner’s second wife and I found echoes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca as Lizzie is tormented with curiosity about her predecessor, Lucie, who she is told died in childbirth in her native France. ‘I wondered if any of the men had known Lucie…They would have seen her. They might have spoke to her. When they saw me, perhaps they compared me to her.’ Like the second Mrs de Winter in Rebecca, Lizzie wonders if she can live up to Lucie’s place in Diner’s memory. ‘I could not see into his thoughts. I was almost afraid to look into them, in case I found Lucie there. Perhaps he was trying to remake with me the life he had loved so much with her.’

As Lizzie learns more about Lucie, doubts about the circumstances of Diner’s first marriage start to surface – doubts the reader may have shared since the opening of the novel. Though this element of mystery runs throughout the novel, it is only one of a number of ideas the book engages with.

For instance, the novel explores the contrast between those who can be categorised as doers or makers – like Diner – and those whose currency is ideas – like Augustus and Lizzie’s mother, Julia. As Diner says about Augustus: “Can he lay a flagstone floor? No. He depends upon those who can. He is as much a guest in the world as a three-year-old child.”

Lizzie moves between the two worlds, recognising the difference in belief and outlook that separates them. ‘Diner lay in the daylight world of building, land and money. His imagination went into stone.’

Lizzie’s husband, John Diner Tredevant is a wonderfully complex creation – if it’s not too much of a cliché, he’s a real Jekyll and Hyde character. On the one hand he is entrepreneurial, single-minded, astute, a self-made man, appreciative of craft skills. ‘He was lit up all through those weeks of early summer. He could see the stone curve of the terrace shaping itself according to his vision and he did not care how hard he drove the men’.

On the other, he is moody, prone to jealousy, possessive, secretive, a hard taskmaster, a man with, one senses, pent-up anger lying just below the surface. Although outwardly loving towards Lizzie, his behaviour shares many of the characteristics of what we would now recognise as coercive control. Added to which, of course, the law considers Lizzie a chattel of her husband. As Diner reminds her, “You have nothing of your own. You are my wife. All that you have belongs to me. All that you are belongs to me.”

For Augustus and Julia, and those who share their radical views, the initial events of the French Revolution provide a concrete example of the people exercising their rights. ‘Human beings really were capable of uniting to defeat tyranny and injustice. A new order could be created, based on the rights of man. And woman too… .Everything they had dreamed of and written about was coming to pass, not two hundred miles from London.’

But as events in France spiral out of control, Augustus and Julia struggle to reconcile their beliefs with the bloodshed and killings. Lizzie gets closer to home than she imagines when she observes to Diner, ‘Once you have taken one life, why not any number? What is to protect you from evil then?…Think of it, Diner. To kill another human being is like crossing a river by a bridge which is then swept away behind you. You can never go back again.’

Diner, with his customary shrewdness, foresees how events in France will create upheaval across Europe and threaten war. Before long, his building scheme and the precarious finances on which it is based, is in jeopardy. “It is this damned uncertainty!” he burst out. “There is no reason in it. It is uncertainty which is killing the market. If there is war with France – no one knows, and so no one will act.” And desperate situations can breed desperate acts as the reader will discover.

Some reviewers have described the novel as ‘slow’, perhaps because the mystery contained with the story takes a long time to play out alongside the other story lines. I would instead categorise the novel’s pace as measured or considered, giving plenty of opportunity to appreciate some of the great writing: ‘My mother was the spinning jenny who span out words to clothe the ideas that burst and bubbled in their brains.’ My one reservation about the novel was the prologue, set in the present day, which seems to serve little purpose.

This is the first novel I’ve read by Helen Dunmore but, on the strength of Birdcage Walk, I will definitely seek out her other books. In her Afterword, the author writes that, ‘The question of what is left behind by a life haunts the novel.’ Helen Dunmore’s untimely death earlier this year sadly means there will be no more books from this talented author but, as far as ‘what is left behind by a life’, in her case it is a legacy of intriguing, thoughtful literature.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of NetGalley and publishers Grove Atlantic in return for an honest review.

I had read favourable reports of this book and started it with high expectations, but I found it very dark and rather formless.
The present time introduction would normally be matched with a same-era closure, but it didn't have this. But it did have lots of suspense and an air f menace - mostly uncalled for, but cleverly written nevertheless.
The stench from a childbirth scene seems to drag on longer than the pregnancy and was very well detailed.
Snatches of news form the French Revolution was quite interesting and the writing style was really good, it's just that I could n;ot gel with the story. I left off to read something lighter but didn't find it helped!

Set in 1792, this is an unsettling read about passion and murder,the French Revolution and the frenetic building boom in the Clifton area of Bristol.
Lizzie Fawkes grew up with a mother who was a writer, and had a wide circle of radical friends who were pamphleteers,poets and political activists,who supported the ideals of the French Revolution that was reaching its violent years abroad. Lizzie was married to John Diner Tredevant,who had invested heavily in the property market and was the developer of some of Bristol's grand terraces near the Clifton bridge and Gorge.
The French Revolution took the head and throne of its King and threatened war with England. This prospect frightened those with money and many grandiose building schemes faltered,leaving many people bankrupt.
I found the description of Bristol to be very accurate and the contrast between the rich and poor areas well described. A strong sense of menace runs throughout this book. The story reads well despite being overly wordy,but the ending just petered out and left so much unanswered.
I pleasantly surprised myself with the French passages,I managed to read them accurately and translate them,but were they necessary?
I didn't warm to the characters and I kept wondering what was the point of the story? Life is short and most people are only known amongst their family for a few generations. I just couldn't get into this story.
I have posted this review on Goodreads.

The subject matter was a little dark, but important, but the book was extremely well written. Those who love historical fiction, around the time of the French Revolution, will enjoy this story of strong yet mostly invisible women. I was saddened to learn that Helen Dunmore had passed away recently.

Pretty good, nice writing. The ending was a little underwhelming.