Rare Birds is an interestingly oblique exercise in weird fiction. Archaeology student Andromeda ("Rom”) Godden and her flatmate Ditto, a dancer, are accosted by a robber in an alley outside a club they frequent. He is driven off by a monstrous beast, “nearly a dog,” which attacks Rom’s dog, Pixie (bequeathed to her by her grandfather), but then vanishes at the approach of some of Ditto’s friends. We are in the 1920s, and the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb has created a craze for Egyptology, music-hall songs about “Old King Tut” are on everyone’s lips, and Rom’s mother and stepfather are, in fact, living in Egypt, although very much off the scene. But despite the strange attack—and the unstated but implied background of all the curses and supernatural events alleged to have unfolded after Howard Carter and the Earl of Carnarvon uncovered the Pharoah’s tomb—what the novel seems to be settling into is a more domestic examination of Rom and Ditto’s relationship.
The novel is deftly set among the student/theatre/gay circles of the time. Rom is trying to finish her studies, apologising to her supervisor for her delay in submitting an essay: A distracting family crisis has resulted from her stepbrother running away from school. The more glamorous Ditto, meanwhile, is rehearsing for what seems to be a horribly down-market revue which begins to lose cast members to a much more prestigious affair featuring a famous French singer, Séraphin Desir, known as “Le Phénix.” Ditto herself, talented and ambitious, is seriously tempted, but cannot afford to lose a full season’s work for three nights at “slave-pay.”
Hazelthorn, however, is setting us up for something much more complex, and the way the novel gives us details and asides and glimpses of characters who become major characters a few chapters later makes for rewarding reading: When we piece together Rom’s family, we see we are set for something else entirely. There is a deepening and darkening mystery about the activities of Rom’s grandfather, Jasper Teague, who was obsessed with alchemical experiments, and whose diaries are drawn upon for many of the chapter epigraphs. Why exactly, for instance, had Jasper wanted his house and its possessions burned to the ground after his death, and why did he leave the dog Pixie to Rom?
Similarly, we remember that Rom’s young stepbrother, Morgan—whom she dislikes intensely—has run away: The mysterious Prideaux, an assistant master at his school, comes upon the scene to play a significant part in future developments. In Edinburgh, Rom finds a dead snake in her room and accuses Morgan of having placed it there; but later, one of Rom’s teachers, Harper—who found an apparent Hittite artefact in a Scottish burial mound—is reported dead, with five snakes found in his bedroom. A medical researcher, Pen Lloyd, contacts Rom after reading a newspaper story about how Pixie, left in London, apparently turned up in Scotland a day later. She describes Pixie as a “faery hound,” is intrigued by her golden collar, and annoys Rom (who puts her down as some sort of crank). Shortly afterwards, they meet again on the train, and Pen tells Rom, Ditto, and Morgan stories about supernatural animals that she heard in wartime Serbia.
When Ditto’s colleague Ivy also disappears, Rom and her brother Alec, and his engineer friend Selwyn, become involved in trying to find out what has happened, and many of the threads that have been established independently begin to intertwine. The investigator Kingsley leads them to Quinn, a showman; the Romani cant vocabulary in their speech (though Quinn is specifically not identified as Romani) recalls a mysterious encounter just before the attack by the dog-beast. We learn that Madame Volkov, the manager of the singer Séraphin Desir, is recruiting for her “Votaries of Light”—apparently, cabaret performers who “run seances.” By now, Rom is not sure whether “it was chaos she was looking at, or the wildest and most terrible design.”
From then on, the strands of weirdness in this complicated novel continue to overlap. Rom’s uncertainty leads her to contact Pen Lloyd again, who shows her what seem to be professional photos of the kind of supernatural being she was talking about: “I call them fey, but I can only guess. Perhaps what people call faeries have only been these people all along.” Pixie is more than a dog, but what she is will not be revealed until much later. Morgan’s early interest in codes and cyphers also becomes crucial. Kingsley provides more information about the network of weird, warring beings hidden within a language which is part fairground cant, part alchemical symbolism, and asks to be paid in blood. Prideaux is a sometimes ally, sometimes adversary, in search of a rare book once in the possession of Jasper Teague—whose own personal quest, and relationship with the “fey,” turns out to have a closer and much more tangible and uncannily personal impact upon Rom than she ever could guess.
By the time of the final confrontation with Madame Volkov and Desir, we have understood something of the mystery of Jasper Teague. He proves to be a much more complicated and haunted man than we understood him to be when we first encountered him as a rather typical weird-fiction “mage” in the manner of those depicted by M. R. James, who was writing in the years leading up to the time when this story is set. Indeed, there is no specific “Jamesian” influence to be pointed to in Rare Birds, although Hazelthorn seems to possess James’s fondness for allowing the story we read to be only part of an overall narrative. As becomes apparent, we have also been given, through cryptic names and references in Kingsley’s negotiations and confrontations, the sense of a long secret history largely hidden to us (and to Rom and her friends), and of which we glimpse only tantalising snippets.
Rare Birds is not an easy novel to persist with, because it does not compromise and offer the kind of hand-waving solution by which all becomes clear. Part of this is surely because it is the first volume of a trilogy (Hangfire) in which all—including Teagues’s alchemical investigations, their implications for the modern world, and the apparent dissolution of some of our major relationships—might yet be resolved. I rather hope it doesn’t happen too quickly or too neatly, because the attraction of Rare Birds is in the tension between various sets of “human” relationships and the parallel worlds, motives, and goals of the “fey” characters. Weird fiction must stay weird. And so far, this is an inventive excursion into the uncanny.