Richard Smyth
Free as a Bird?
Homing: On Pigeons, Dwellings, and Why We Return
By Jon Day
John Murray 255pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
A memoir of pigeon keeping and middle-class life in flux, Jon Day’s Homing is a sort of P Is for Pigeon, diligently if somewhat bloodlessly filling out the template set by Helen Macdonald for exploring the wild and the tame, home and family, flight and return. It’s never compelling but it’s often interesting.
Day, a literary critic and academic by trade, takes up pigeon racing in a fit of hipster amateurism (and, by writing about it, adds to a subgenre that includes start-up beekeeper Helen Jukes’s recent A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings). At the same time, he and his pregnant partner, Natalya, settle into a new home in not-quite-gentrified Leyton, east London, with their young daughter, Dora. These strands are interwoven in the approved manner with potted histories, pigeon lore and forays into literature.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The unisexual roster saves us from diatribes about the iniquity of the male gaze, and in any case the female gaze is capable of retaliating by aestheticising and eroticising the bodies of men.'
Peter Conrad on @markcousinsfilm's new documentary.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/lets-get-this-show-on-the-road
Dethier 'writes about mud buildings without the telltale modulations other critics use to distance so-called vernacular construction from the canon of high architecture.'
Building with earth may be the future, says @PhinHarper.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/build-brown-go-green
'Their legacy is tenacious. Throughout Europe, it lingers in the placement of borders, in patterns of confessional belief, in styles of architecture, even in ideas of national and supranational sovereignty.'
John Adamson on the hardy Habsburgs.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/born-to-marry