Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter review – a bravura rendering of bereavement

Actor Russell Tovey’s narration crackles with compassion and menace in this magical story of a widower and his young sons in mourning

Less than a week after the sudden death of his wife, a grieving man opens his front door to a giant crow who scoops him up into his wing and tells him: “I won’t leave until you don’t need me anymore.” Still in shock, the man is facing the prospect of raising his two young sons alone. The bird, which has previously been roaming around the family’s flat at night, has observed a household of “heavy mourning, every surface dead Mum, every crayon, tractor, coat, welly covered in a film of grief”. In that first visit, the man “woke up and didn’t see me against the blackness of his trauma”.

First published in 2015 and since adapted as a play and film, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers is an inventive and sharply observed novella by Max Porter which uses verse, dialogue and the supernatural to examine a family grappling with the loss of a wife and mother who had been “busy living, and then she was gone”. In a story that shifts between the perspectives of “Dad”, “Boys” and “Crow”, we learn the man is a writer who is working on a book about the poet Ted Hughes called Crow on the Couch.
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