Carrion Crow
Heather Parry
Book of the Month: February 2025
Reviewed by Maxime Swift
Does the caged bird sing, or does it scream? In Heather Parry’s new novel Carrion Crow, a brilliantly claustrophobic tale of confinement, the line between woman, bird and beast becomes increasingly blurred.
Carrion Crow is a two-stranded novel, with the alternating stories of Marguerite, the eldest daughter of the Périgord family, and her controlling mother, Cécile, woven together to form a reflection of their mirrored experiences of female desire, disappointment and disgust.
The novel starts with Marguerite being confined to her family’s townhouse attic with only Victor Hugo’s entire works, a Singer sewing machine, and Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management for both education and entertainment. Marguerite devours everything Mrs Beeton has to say, learning the whole book off-by-heart. Throughout her confinement, her recitations of Beeton’s instructions for lavish dishes become her last remaining connection to Victorian society. Parry plays with the authoritative voice of Beeton, letting her edicts for hosting ring out in the juxtaposing setting of Marguerite’s lonely, cramped captivity – and ‘under such circumstances, the stomach soon becomes deranged’.
This recipe-induced madness is the first layer of horror in the book. The effects of starvation clearly take their toll on Marguerite, leaving her stomach ‘collapsing inwards, folding like an envelope’. Her body is under continual pressure to change through the enforced confinement her mother places her under and Marguerite’s own desire to become pregnant. These opposing forces of shrinking and expanding not only wreak havoc on her body, but also her state of mind, reaching a wild climax in the finale of the novel, where Marguerite – equipped with her sewing machine – takes on the role of both Frankenstein and his monster, leaving her body in a completely transformed state.
Through Marguerite, Parry explores the potential of body horror, but Cécile’s story is a horror of a different kind: the slow reveal of her background and youth, her tantalising rise into the fold of old money society through marriage, and the fallout from this class transgression. Within Cécile lies beauty and violence, and a taste for the finer things in life – the novel has sickeningly indulgent descriptions of Victorian dinner parties, with Cécile remembering dishes from her wedding banquet like a ‘thick slice of honeyed ham, muscle-pink and edged with jellied fat, or a shredded pile of lobster swimming in a pool of butter’. These invocations of excess are always followed with the bodily consequences, with Parry describing high-society women having vomiting spells over the gout-ridden feet of their husbands.
Through Cécile, Parry introduces critiques of class, colonialism and the politics of food. The idea of the ‘civilisation project’ is bandied about by missionaries at Cécile’s door, asking for donations to the church whilst chastising British women for not sufficiently taming their husbands and keeping them under control. All relationships seem to have this vertiginous dynamic of power. Utterly powerless both to her tycoon father and her hedonistic husband, she turns her fury inwards, not just towards herself but to her flesh and blood – her children. Cécile’s rage quakes through the novel, bubbling up throughout her children’s early life, and finally turning to unbelievable cruelty towards her attic-confined daughter.
As well as being a story exploring the turbulence of mother-daughter relationships, Carrion Crow is also a tale of the brutal metamorphosis from daughter into wife, girl into woman, and wife into mother. These transformations are bodily and societal, with the two women’s stories crossing genres: Marguerite’s descent into madness and the extremity of her bodily change feels embedded in a history of literature of female unreliable narrators mixed with Cronenberg levels of body horror, whereas Cécile’s story feels more intertwined with the suffocating reality of Victorian Britain and the horror of empire both abroad and at home. Cécile’s narrative feels deeply political and grounds Carrion Crow’s more experimental and folkloric ideas, like the nightmarish fairytale of a young woman’s transformation from girl into bird/woman. This is a cautionary tale of the societal pressures that have left so many women unfulfilled and overwhelmed, from the Victorian times to our contemporary moment.
Carrion Crow is published by Doubleday
Maxime Swift is a writer and broadcaster based in Edinburgh. She co-hosts the literary radio show Type on Paper on EHFM and co-runs Votive Gallery, an itinerant curatorial project showcasing international emerging artists in the city.