Bird Summons by Leila Aboulela review – lyrical examination of identity (original) (raw)

Three times Women’s prize-longlisted author Leila Aboulela has garnered high praise for her books about the experiences of Muslim women in Britain, lyrical works examining homesickness, grief and the liminal nature of immigrant identities. Sudanese but settled in Aberdeen, Aboulela is the author of four novels and two short-story collections with Islam at their heart. Her 1999 debut The Translator chronicled a grieving Sudanese widow’s deepening friendship with a non-religious Scottish scholar, and the questions of faith and desire thereby provoked. Minaret (2005) told the story of an upper-class secular Sudanese woman’s path to Islam while exiled in London. And last year’s short story collection Elsewhere, Home was praised for its intimate gaze into the lives of characters existing between their birth and adopted countries.

Her latest novel through the eyes of three women who embark on a holiday-cum-pilgrimage to the grave of the 19th-century Scottish Muslim convert Lady Evelyn Cobbold. Salma, the self-appointed group leader, is married to a British convert but is flirting covertly via text with the former fiance she left behind in Egypt. Moni has given up a banking career to care for her disabled son, and is resisting her husband’s desire to ship the family to Saudi Arabia. And Iman, young, beautiful and with three failed marriages behind her, has barely had the chance to construct her own identity as she wrestles with the one foisted on her by the encircling structures of masculinity and religion.

Aboulela’s prose is restrained but warm. There is a calm amusement in her tone when the women mock the overly conservative men in their lives, one of whom is so committed to keeping his wife’s hair from male eyes that he makes her remove strands from the plughole. For western readers, Aboulela offers rare and precious insight into the minds of women who believe that husbands should be obeyed – Moni’s dogged devotion to the care of her disabled son, which is tenderly described early in the novel, is viewed by her friends as a betrayal of her marriage vows.

The characters are well drawn, Moni in particular. However, the author’s talents are sadly undermined by the arrival of a bird who speaks in parables, and the book descends into an extended fantastical sequence that pays tribute to magic realism but lacks the scaffolding to pull it off. The overlapping of Muslim and Celtic myths shows ambition, but the bird’s extended moralising and the cursory way in which Lady Evelyn’s story is treated frustrate the quest for deeper meaning.