The White Feather – a story about not telling stories
Sometimes you come across something that rings bells deep in your head. You think you know the tune, but the bells in one tower aren’t tuned in quite the same way as another. You recognize the notes together, but not each individually, and therein lies the surprise.
I got to know Valerie French a short while ago over coffee that turned into lunch with a bunch of writers. She had just published this novel, The White Feather, her first, after a career in journalism. It was a project, she said, of probing a past she knew she couldn’t revisit. Its themes and plot elements run parallel to those in a novel I’m currently trying to publish. I bought and read hers immediately.
Her story involves a merchant sailor and his daughter, and the things they never said to each other. The father, Harold, clearly loved young Vanessa, perhaps making up for the lack of love he had endured in an orphanage before facing hardships at sea during the Second World War. Across the novel, together, father and daughter speak past each other as they grow apart.
The novel is built, structurally, on a series of alternating narratives – father mainly, recounting his experiences in a factual way; daughter shorter, as a schoolgirl emerging from a dreary life in the 1970s. He describes. She seems to seek answers to the questions she doesn’t know how to ask. They talk to us, the readers. They recount the parts of their lives they never said to each other, memories and opportunities missed to know each other better.
A white feather – an accidental icon whose meaning is rich but defies explication – links the two narratives, as father and daughter talk into a void and past each other. This approach leaves many questions unanswered. But that is how it must be, for this is a story about caring people who cannot communicate how or how much they care.
I would like to have heard more from the daughter in this story, but the father’s story – and especially the attack by a submarine at sea off the coast of Africa and the ensuing hardship – is poignant.
Several weeks later after finishing the book, the bells keep ringing a familiar yet different set of notes.