It's a crazy world we live in and Birdy's particular cloudcanaryland is his mental escape from the confinement of a military hospital. In his first novel, William Wharton uses the structural contrast of his hero's carefully described bird-world and the earthbound reality contributed by Alfonso, the old school-friend imported to bridge the gap between the two, as a mirror of the mental division symptomatic of what the crazy world assumes to be insanity.

We all have our own private kinds of craziness, Alfonso comments. The author strips the privacy from the craziness of one individual in a book where the only apparent behavioural sanity is found in the dream world of birds. Who is crazy? Birdy 's answer is that crazy people are the ones who see things clear but work out a way to live with it, his own way being total self-involvement with the bird-world. The question is hackneyed and the apparent answer the book provides is obvious but nevertheless the flights of fancy contained within the structured patchwork of its chapters provide an original approach. One can look forward to the day when the author's wings are spread on other flight-paths.