Snake and a Feathered Bird, A

A Snake and a Feathered Bird
by Angie Ellis
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Brandon Fick
$24.95 ISBN 9781771872812

Angie Ellis’s ambitious debut novel, A Snake and a Feathered Bird, began in such a way that I wasn’t sure I’d like it: the characters seemed guarded, the relationships and context opaque. After a series of events in the second chapter, I wondered where the story would go. What was it about? Really, I just needed patience. Ellis slowly peels back the layers of her characters, and the result is a deeply felt yet often restrained novel. While historical, it is relevant to our times.

This is the story of Ben Maclean’s coming-of-age in late-nineteenth century Vancouver Island, mostly around 1890-1891, with flashbacks to the 1870s and 1880s following characters connected to Ben. At the beginning of the novel, Ben is living in a rural cabin with Agda and James, who he thinks are his parents. At nine, on a bootlegging run with James to a city that’s presumably Victoria, he meets Lily, who he’s told is his cousin, and misfortune strikes. Soon after returning to their cabin, Ben’s protective mother Agda mysteriously dies. Further summary cannot capture the complexity this novel offers – you simply have to read it.

Ellis excels at rendering an environment where life is hacked out of the wilderness; illness, hunger, and death are always close at hand, and in the city, prostitution and drunkenness, poverty and hard labour are facts of life. Yet this is not dry historical fiction, filled with deadening details. Ellis is writing for a contemporary audience and knows how to conjure atmosphere: “They passed shops with swinging signs and giant windows. Shining brass lamps. Tall doors of polished wood and glass. The shops sold cigars, boots, dead chickens, gloves, bread… Sounds rose up through the bottoms of Ben’s shoes – the crunching of iron wheels on cobbles, horses clopping, voices shouting, gulls calling.”

Beyond Ben, wrapped up in others’ plans while trying to understand who his family is, the novel contains at least a half-dozen other rich characters. James, seemingly harsh, paired with the seemingly meek Agda. Lily, a seemingly errant, carefree woman who grew up among prostitutes. Effie, Ben’s childhood friend from the neighbouring Stenhouse family, a seemingly “sharp, hardened” girl with a brace on her leg. Even minor characters come alive. In the main timeline of 1890, when Ben is drawn to the city to fulfill a bequest from James to Lily, he encounters Gus, a butcher with “a wooden pig, three feet tall, hind-footed and saluting” outside his shop, a small, bespectacled preacher who runs a creamery, and Mae, a romantic counterpoint to Effie, who gives Ben his first sexual experiences. Mr. and Mrs. Petrenko, who run a dry goods store on the trail to the city, also prove to be relevant. One way Ellis brings her characters to life is by giving them distinctive traits, whether that’s Lily’s habit of calling Ben “Mouse,” and the backstory behind that, or Ben’s gestures and restlessness speaking to his true lineage.

Early word has compared Ellis’s writing to William Faulkner, which is high praise, but it definitely evokes Faulkner’s moody examinations of particular locales. The way chapters are titled by characters’ names and the non-chronological storytelling reminded me of As I Lay Dying. Wayward characters and unknown ancestry is reminiscent of Light in August. Yet there’s also a Dickensian quality to A Snake and a Feathered Bird. Ben is in the mould of orphans like Pip or David Copperfield, and his adventures, while not always earth-shattering, feel like they could be in a nineteenth century novel. On another level, this is recently written Canadian fiction. Like many Canadian historical novels of the last few decades, it highlights marginality – being a spinster or prostitute, dealing with a disability – but I’d argue it does so in less showy ways than other books. Deep resonance is felt in a scene where Ben and Mae are walking to church for work – they pass a site where Songhees people used to dig for clams, and a field with cairns and children playing. Mae says: “All the fancy houses will go here over those Indian graves.” Colonialism is not a major theme, but this moment contextualizes the era, showing that the story’s events exist in a world of even darker, neglected events.

Coming-of-age stories will always have an audience, but the even-handed depiction of rural versus urban living and the subjective understanding of people may offer more for readers to think about. At a time when rural versus urban divides are widening and social media conditions us to view people in black or white terms, the novel tells us there is more to every story. Ben realizes the city is not as bad as he was warned, yet he feels pulled back to the country, his obligations, and Effie. Characters gain depth and secret inner lives are revealed. The title references a quote from a book that the preacher lends Ben, Richard Lydekker’s The Royal Natural History: “To an ordinary observer there would seem but little in common between a scaled lizard or snake, a cuirassed crocodile, and a carapaced tortoise, on the one hand, and a feathered bird on the other. Nevertheless, the connection between Reptiles and Birds is exceedingly intimate…” Behind differences lie commonality. A Snake and a Feathered Bird is a book comfortable in its contradictions. This makes it a book worth reading, and Angie Ellis a writer to watch.

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