All the Way to Cape Grimm: Reflections on Carmel Bird's Fiction

Carmel Bird is a great story-teller and a consummate stylist. Herstories - of lost children, of helpless and abused psychiatric patients, of whole groups of people in the grip of strange cults - tap into the deepest levels of human anxiety. Bird is especially interested in the phenomenon of charisma: the rise of medical and religious charlatans, the mesmerising power they exert, and the terrible damage they cause. These are bad, mad people, and she offers no extenuation for their crimes. Although Bird's narratives raise important social questions, their concerns are much more profound. Their presentation - by means of the fantastic, the absurd, the Gothic - guarantees their compelling interest. Startling and often bizarre details - for instance a heritage village build under a glass dome above the Gorge at Launceston; a woman who decides to knit a chapel; a laconic guardian angel narrating a story enliven texts which are fantastic enough in themselves, yet pretend to realism. No story by Carmel Bird stands alone: depth upon depth of reference underlies the surface of each novel. Ancient myths and legends and stories of historical cruelty and excess parallel the events of the narrative, and there is information on such obscure topics as Fibonacci mathematical sequences, the Beaufort Wind Force Scale, and the El Niño weather pattern. These references are usually woven into the fabric of the novel, but are often amplified in the appendices.