Heather Parry’s fourth book Carrion Crow is a distressing, claustrophobic read. Set in London’s Chelsea in the late 19th century, Marguerite Périgord, the 19-year-old daughter of a once aristocratic French family, is confined to the attic by her mother “for the sake of her wellbeing”.
Marguerite is engaged to be married to a Mr George Lewis, a solicitor 35 years her senior. Her mother, Cécile, doesn’t believe she is quite ready for married life. So she leads Marguerite to the attic, where the lack of light will allow her to “acquire the upper-class pallor” required of a new wife, and the small meals that Cécile delivers on a tray will help Marguerite “establish within herself the reserved palate and physical restraint of the married lady”.
For company Marguerite has only the works of Victor Hugo, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, and a black-and-gold sewing machine — she is surrounded by the expectations of her class and of her gender. Quickly bored, she starts poking around in the crumbling rafters and discovers a carrion crow nesting in the roof. As Marguerite begins to feel more and more abandoned, she notices the crow has laid eggs and is preparing to raise its own family.
Glasgow-based Parry, whose previous books include the novel Orpheus Builds a Girl and the non-fiction work Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism, has said that she based Carrion Crow on the tale of Blanche Monnier, a French socialite whose mother and brother kept her secretly locked inside for 25 years.
At first Marguerite believes she is being kept in the attic for a couple of weeks. Then she begins to lose track of time, but thinks the number of nights are increasing between her mother’s meal deliveries. Mr Lewis stops writing her letters. Her hair begins to fall out.
It’s an absorbing story, if an utterly disgusting one. Parry describes, in vivid detail, how “Marguerite could entertain herself for hours with the investigation of her own tonsils”, making herself retch in order to bring up “a beige nugget of matter” that she then plays with, enjoying its putrid smell. On another occasion she steals an egg from the crow’s nest and eats it — raw. Later she takes a doll she has made from torn bed sheets and, dreaming of becoming a mother, stitches it on to her stomach, “beneath the divot where her ribs met”.
The precision of Parry’s prose leads to some gag-inducing scenes. Yet she maintains an intriguing vagueness as she narrates her character’s turn to hallucination. Marguerite thinks often of someone named Alouette, whom Parry describes in avian metaphors (“Alouette made her own money; she shook it from her wings every evening”; “They would go about their days without a concern . . . raising their baby birds”) to the extent that you wonder if Marguerite is dreaming up the crow as some kind of illusory lover.
What could lead a mother to treat her daughter with such cruelty? Parry unfurls a history of shameful family misdemeanours involving both Cécile’s father and her husband, incidents that left Cécile alone with three children before the age of 30 and drove her to cut her wrists. A doctor advised that she stay inside, in a manner that mirrors Marguerite’s imprisonment: “She was confined for one year. It was for her own good.”
With Marguerite and Cécile — two maddened and maddening yet also quite sympathetic characters — Parry shows us how trauma can be inherited, and that women can be complicit in handing down the worst of the patriarchy.
For a novel so full of unanticipated turns, its final scene feels disappointingly generic, full of just the kind of action you’d expect in a story that enjoys bird metaphors. Otherwise Carrion Crow is a worthy entrant into the contemporary gothic hall of fame — a natural cousin to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, with the feminist body horror spearheaded in recent years by authors such as Eliza Clark. I’m not sure the pure rancidness of this book will ever totally leave me.
Carrion Crow by Heather Parry, Doubleday £16.99, 256 pages
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