When one of your best-loved Authors writes about your most-treasured bird and publishes with an independent vegan publisher of ecofiction, it is impossible for this reader to curb her enthusiasm.
“Two small crows reach with red feet and alight on the Hag. They dance along her spine with measured, delicate steps to the music of instinct.”
This lyrical excerpt from The Crows of Beara, Julie Christine Johnson’s second novel, epitomises the irresistible language that drew me to Johnson’s Chalk the Sun Blog, her award-winning short stories, and her debut novel, In Another Life.
The protagonist, Annie Crowe, is a recovering alcoholic whose marriage and job has skidded beyond the boundaries of unconditional forgiveness and second chances. But, unlike her husband, who expresses the “end of his solidarity” by throwing a beer bottle at her head, Annie’s boss acquiesces to a final gamble in which she authorises Annie to spearhead a PR campaign for a mining conglomerate in Ireland. Annie views the opportunity as a life-line and resolves to maintain her sobriety and glue her shredded credibility back together.
While Annie prepares for her trip to Ireland we learn the sources of her alcoholism: a drunk driving accident in which her brother dies and her inebriated mother survives; and a leg injury that ends Annie’s running career. Meanwhile, in Ireland, we meet Daniel, a local artist. We sense from the outset that Daniel is a likely love interest for Annie, until we learn about a conflict—Daniel, also a recovering alcoholic, is an ex-con. After driving drunk and colliding with a family of four, the youngest child dies in hospital and Daniel is sentenced to 5 years imprisonment for vehicular manslaughter.
On the day of Annie’s arrival in Beara she hears a woman’s voice whisper “Mór mo phian”—a phrase she can’t translate, but which nonetheless resonates with a part of herself that she previously numbed with alcoholism. On hearing the refrain, Annie glimpses Daniel—a clear signal to the reader that fate will connect them. A signal that is reinforced when Daniel hears the same voice whisper “Mór mo bhrón” (“Great my sorrow”) as Annie crosses the street. This mysterious voice creates an invisible thread between Annie and Daniel, which continues to draw them together as the story unfolds.
At this stage Annie is oblivious to the Beara Hag Legend, and the vulnerable environmental status of the Red-billed Chough, but she soon learns about double dealings designed to create an uneven playing field between her client and the locals. As a result, Annie’s task to marry environmental with business interests for her mining client proves to challenge her conscience from the outset.
The more we learn about Annie’s interior world, the more her fate seems intertwined with the crows of Beara. Just like their environmental status depends on Daniel’s intervention, so too is Annie’s future wellbeing dependent on her interaction with Daniel and time spent on Beara. When staring at the Atlantic Ocean, Annie is “overcome by an emotion she [can’t] name, some mixture of transcendent joy and raw sorrow.” When discussing the crows, Daniel describes “Nature as a cultural artifact”, a statement that sticks in Annie’s thoughts, like a yellow post-it, for the length of her ten day stay. At one point Annie tells Daniel: “I’ve stepped into something bigger than me…I don’t know what I’m doing here.” But Daniel knows…
Before Annie learns that Daniel is an artist, she connects to his work — a sculpture that “glowed with the light of setting suns and rising moons.” In this moment, Daniel recognises a quality in Annie that she is not yet aware of: “[he] knew he’d connected with an artist [and] recognized a different kind of need, a hunger to enter a different kind of world.” For Daniel, the crows represent “what coming back from nothingness might feel like, how quickly freedom could be lost and what it cost to be granted a second chance.” This incredible perception extends to his affinity with Annie, in which he recognises that Beara, the crows, and his own experience of healing through his art, hold the power to unlock Annie’s “coming back from nothingness.”
This poetry between souls falls out of rhythm when Annie learns about Daniel’s past. But, where human’s falter to connect, the Beara Hag legend, combined with the Red-billed Choughs’s plight, bridge the gap. Once Annie pieces the copper mine puzzle together, confronts her personal value judgement about Daniel, and learns that the presence of the Hag is “seeking out those in need of her wisdom and lifting them to grace”, she puts her job at risk and helps the locals thwart the mine. Eighteen months later, Annie leads a group of photographers where the “precious crows swoop and chirp” and recites the Beara Hag Poem that is etched into the landscape of her soul.
It is clear to see why Ashland Creek published Johnson’s novel, for it perfectly aligns with their motto: “We are passionate about books that foster an appreciation for worlds outside our own, for nature and the animal kingdom, and for the ways in which we all connect.”
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Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2018
Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2017
Brings the Beara Peninsula of Ireland to life. Annie and Daniel fight to protect a small black bird.
Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2020Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2017
