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Leila Aboulela (2019) Bird Summons London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson

Training to read literary fiction involves a kind of detection of the texts that constitute the conversation between genres, periods and sociocultural phenomena that is taking place in the interstices of any one single text before us – in the transitions between narrative forms and styles and textual references. This is what we once called intertextuality. Hence, I was delighted to recognise in this novel that there were areas both outside and inside my cultural competence: seeing allegoric form, even The Pilgrim’s Progress in parts, quest narratives, strong hints of magical narrative transitions that I have only seen in this intensity in George Macdonald’s Phantastes as well as tropes from the feminist road novel and movie. That part of my delight that had gone unrecognised as egotistic was revealed by the fact that Aboulela declares these sources in her informative ‘Author’s Note’ (pp.285ff.). In that note she also gives more insight to traditions unknown to me from the Qur’an  both at the level of its narrative agents and spiritual purpose – notably the djinns, used much more mechanically in Rushdie, and the Hoopoe bird. The Note gives more than enough to help reading or retrospection (the latter for me) on that bird in Attar’s Conference of Birds but didn’t destroy for me the sense that Chaucer, that multi-cultural internationalist, may have been doing something analogous in Parliament of Fowls.

There is enough to help you to read this novel in all respect to its intertextual and intercultural strength, but also enough to show that this novel is not the run of the mill form from any of those conventions, even the feminist novel of gender awareness and fulfilment, although it must be that too. There is something that is more spiritual than the simpler allegories of Bunyan, that lives in the realms of the spirit and here I think George MacDonald is as strong an instance as the Qur’an.

And spirit lives not in intertextuality but in the interplay of stories. In this text, people (and birds) tell stories to specific audiences about people who tell stories to specific audiences about people ….. And so it goes on. Stories take on the role of predictions, warnings and fulfilments. They fuse across time and place, finding new meanings as they do so. And these stories are not only about transformations of spirit, body and moral purpose but senses of possible endings where no one end is, in the end, a teleological end. But a teleology there is – stronger than in any novel of our period – a sense that actions must and will be judged in the story’s ending, something that is ruthlessly part of religion that does not wash out the necessity to follow a ‘good life’ in spiritual mysticism, or alcohol which is the nearest equivalent in the non-religious novel.

Hence this novel can be about adultery, cultural betrayal and the meaning of the hijab, caring and the differently-abled, marriage, child-bearing, the meaning, role-playing and role-refusal in the realms of art and ethics, the nature of leadership and submission to a leader and never let us forget that there are better and worse ethical decisions to be made. That what you wear or not wear might be part of that decision-making. This is a deeply alien kind of meaning-making in the contemporary Occident. This novel then seems more different than any I have read and the mark of the tolerance of this difference by our sensibility, the mark of our tolerance to a challenging and revived form of spiritualised morality in literature, where objects take on subjective meanings that define the world we live in by straining to become those objects ontologically rather than epistemologically.

There is a purpose in metamorphosis, appearance and disappearance. Moni must learn what it is to be ball rolled around by others, Iman a voiceless predator, Salma a spineless jelly. The actual purpose of such transformations is not to tell you though what each person is ontologically but what they might ontologically become when the wrong decisions are made. And the nature of these decisions and commitment to them differs for each of these women. So whilst Salma learns engaged commitment, Moni and Iman learn flexibility and not to be governed by socio-culturally  induced wishes on any side or from any origin.

Almost any passage will reveal the difference of this great writing to the common run. The person is laid out before us -always allowed latitude but ultimately there to be judged in as far as they do not commit to judging themselves and their desire appropriately and without denial of desire. This strangeness can be felt in this passage. If it seems irremediably wrong to you, you may not be able to read this novel. It should disturb, it might change you. If it does neither – if it repels you, the novel may sweep by you dismissed in a superficial slur.

When she joined the others in the living room, she found hat Iman had finally agreed to sing. At first, she sang grudgingly, but then she let the beauty slide through. Outside the cottage, her voice could be heard, the foreign words landing on the grass, picked up by the ears of djinns and those with wings, who understood even more than all three women did what Iman’s song was saying, who she was describing, for whom the longing was due.

Stories about conversion in kind are stories about nation and culture, Scotland and Egypt, the meaning of monuments, even Dunnottar Castle. It is as great as it is currently neglected. Let’s make it not so – it should be as great as it appeals to us by its challenge.