Mountain Devil

Recommend: Yes

Flock of Brown Birds is my first book from a new Randwick Library initiative for donated books. These books sit quarantined in their own section. They undergo a less rigorous introduction to the library, needing less contacting and less administrative logging, and were introduced after reports that many patrons wanted their used books to have new lives. I support this new program with my usual library gusto. I borrow ten of them and fail to return them as the months stretch on and now am being posted replacement invoices.

Having just struggled through The Memory Police, I was hesitant to start another exploration into the theme of memory. It’s a universal thematic, yes, but one that is hard to master, often failing to cohere narratively due to its inherent slippery nature. The Memory Police took a very literal approach: memories of particular items were erased from the collective consciousness, forcing the characters to reevaluate the importance of what remained.

Flock of Brown Birds was published in China in 1989, so is also of Asian descent. Despite its age, Flock of Brown Birds is much more engaging and vividly rendered than The Memory Police, which was first published in Japan in the 1990s.

The Memory Police was static. All of the plot took place at one point in time, on one island, to a few central characters. It treated memory as an aspect of life that was as material as a piece of clothing – something so easy to dislodge and discard.

Flock of Brown Birds is completely ungrounded in comparison. Memory here is something completely Other. It is an untamed force that gives meaning to the present while at the same time locks us in the past. Memory’s volatility creates the eerie tension in Flock of Brown Birds, unlike in The Memory Police where it was controlled and boring.

The novella opens with its protagonist, an author himself, completing his work at a retreat that overlooks a quiet lakefront. There is something Ballardian about this place, called the ‘Waterside’. It seems to sit heavily on nature, as though it is squashing some essential organic rhythm. This sense of malaise is heightened with the first plot complication: a woman, purportedly a stranger to the protagonist, knocks on his door, sits down on his couch, and unburdens herself upon him as if she were an old friend.

From here, there is a delicious narrative dance between the present and the past, as protagonist recounts particular memories of his to this woman who exudes such bizarre intimacy.

I’ve discovered something unusual about your stories, Qi said.

What’s that?

Your stories are circular. The plot development is basically repetition. As long as you’re enjoying yourself, you could just keep going ad infinitum.

There is a slight of hand at work here that was surely inspired by Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. The reader gets thrown from one reality to another, each narrated with a confidence and realism that is reassuring at first but that slowly decays as the storyline plunges into its own murky depths. A shock return to an earlier, seemingly familiar, timeline provides the reader with a brief reprieve, allowing the reader to pretend in good faith that it will all make sense soon. Yet once the final page has been turned it’s clear that the real story – the underlying truth – never emerged.

Qi got up from the chair in my apartment, knowing that there was no where left for my story to go.

I don’t believe there is comprehensible plot in Flock of Brown Birds. To describe that shape of this story is infuriating because it is deliberately shapeless. Characters that know each other in one scene will be complete strangers to each other by the end. Settings introduced with painstaking detail morph into something similar, but undeniably inconsistent, when they are later returned to. The accuracy of our memories and, by deduction, the stories we tell of ourselves are so clearly under inspection. Flock of Brown Birds never confirms what layer of the narrative is the original one, the one that holds the truth. And that begs the unanswered question: for whatever isn’t true, is it deliberately false or incidentally false?

My memory was a rusty chain, disintegrating link by link into dust.

There is the suggestion that story telling is a deliberate disturbance to the natural movement of the world. To tell stories continuously is to unbalance one’s self from the security of time and history, and therefore teasing reality from fiction becomes more difficult.

None of that sounds tantalising. But it is, because the writing is so beautiful and open. Story telling in Flock of Brown Birds is not a means to an end but the end itself. There is nothing but the edges of each story, which I, as a reader, so badly want to connect, yet my attempts to do so are futile.

I take away from Flock of Brown Birds that memories are small stories that we rearrange constantly to fit a broader narrative. This narrative is eternally dynamic. It can allow us to understand ourselves and others, but also can sometimes cause us to get stuck, lost within our own story.

One day, maybe on my own visit to a misty village in central China, I’d like to re-read Flock of Brown Birds and see if I missed a key detail that ties it all together. I probably didn’t. It is likely just an ambiguous novella that slips in and out of your mind, like your own memories, always changing form, keeping you rooted in your past, even as time rushes forward.