The Pigeon

After a trip to London (and the request seven hours on various and much delayed coaches) has coincided with a stack of very short books I’m stuck playing catch up on the blog.   By the time you read this my trip to the capital will probably be a month past.  That’s what you get for reading three books in one day.  Anyway, future trips will align with long books; kicking things off with a 77 page novella was a mistake.  Or maybe it wasn’t.  The Pigeon is short and super intense so it’s kind of ideal to read in one sitting, the way I’ve been forced to read it.  Add to that a creepy guy trying to take up half of my seat and making me feel awkward as balls and you get a pretty much perfect reading scenario for a story about a guy completely flipping his shit over nothing.

The Pigeon it is important to establish isn’t one for ornithologists.  Anyone expecting some kind of urban Kes is in the wrong place.  In fact, the bird itself appears in one scene.  The book’s more about the consequences of the pigeon than an actual bird.  One day, well respected man Jonathan Noel is leaving his dingy rooms to start another day of work just as he has for the thousands of days that preceded it.  But on this one day there is a pigeon in his corridor.  The pigeon is essentially just the catalyst that causes Noel to question his brand of living and so from this point on, he is on edge.  Noel questions thirty carefully constructed years of order over one event he cannot control.  As the day wears on he is distracted at work, tears a hole in his trousers and plans to never return to his room because the pigeon has sullied it.  It doesn’t sound like much of a story, but Noel’s problems pile up so thick and fast that you forget he’s obsessing over nothing.

Now, I myself am inclined to worry and obsess over nothing.  I even have a healthy hatred of a

common pest (one that caused two different friends to buy me spider repellent kit for my last birthday).  As such, I can relate to Noel.  It’s refreshing to know that I’m not the only person in world who blows insignificant things out of all proportion.  Admittedly, it’s a tad disconcerting to read simply because Noel seems to be having a bit of a mental breakdown and the book’s full of moments and thing that I recognise myself doing and I like to think that I pretty much have my shit together.  Noel is one of those characters that you don’t really want to be similar to.  His life is a happy one.  But it is a lonely live contrasted with painful care.  It’s not the sort of life most people want to end up living.

I feel like I’m not saying that much about the book itself.  But that’s only because so little really happens.  Everything that is of any interest in The Pigeon is down to Patrick Süskind’s marvellous style.  It’s strange to refer to a book in which one of the main events is literally a man tearing a whole in his trousers as unrelenting but it’s true.  I don’t remember the last time I cared about the fate of someone else’s trousers so much.  It’s a something that is going to be lost in the retelling, so I don’t see the point in saying too much more.  Just go and read it.

Next up (and already read in full): Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud.  It too has a misleading title.