Anna Smaill’s second novel is an ornate exploration of grief, friendship and brilliance, which centres on four characters, two of whom are cast as ordinary and two as extraordinary. After the suicide of her twin brother, Michael, Dinah moves from New Zealand to Japan to teach English. Michael was a musical prodigy; aged 10, he played piano better than his teacher. By 13, he was also eloquent beyond his years: The Magic Flute, he explains to his sister, is “the best” because “there is nothing tragic in it. The tragedy has been burned off. Vaporised. Like sun on wet pavement.” For reasons that become clear only later on, Dinah had not seen Michael for a year before the day he died. In her new surroundings, Dinah feels guilty and lost, as though “everything were just a little bit out of sync with itself”.
She makes friends with Yasuko, an older colleague at the university. Drawing a parallel with Michael, Yasuko is described as “just too subtle, too perfect”. The novel is unsubtle about its love of Yasuko’s designer clothes and her collection of live beetles. In one set piece, Yasuko reveals her knowledge of translators of Cervantes into Japanese to a pet shop owner. In another, she shouts at an obnoxious homeless man on the commuter train, then tosses a handful of change on to the platform, so that he has to scramble after it. For Dinah, there is “something in Yasuko’s presence [that acts] like a necklace of protection”. Dinah recognises in Yasuko her own feelings of “emptiness and panic”.
Smaill’s first novel, The Chimes, longlisted for the Booker prize, was a high-concept dystopian fiction, set in a radically alternative London. As Michael begins speaking to his sister from beyond the grave, Bird Life invites a more psychological reading of its speculative elements. Michael’s presence is a way of exploring Dinah’s grief. Yasuko has “powers”, which first appeared around adolescence, when a cat called her a “slattern”. Shortly afterwards, she was warned by a mouse that her mother would die. When the premonition came true, her scientist father locked her in her room for an entire year, during which time Yasuko refused to eat. The novel doesn’t dwell on the logistics of this episode, but does insist that it makes the character exceptional: “No one is tested beyond what they can bear, but Yasuko Kinoshita had been.”
Now she has a 21-year-old son, Jun. When he disappears, she finds that her “powers have returned at last”, perhaps because the situation opens up past trauma. She speaks to the fish in the park. A passing peacock says, without opening its beak: “We know you are suffering … We have been watching you.” Other birds offer oblique clues, and it feels as though the narrative might become an interspecies detective fiction, in which nonhuman witnesses help solve the mystery of Jun’s disappearance. But then the birds fly into the background, where they furnish the prose with the occasional avian flourish.
Yasuko’s powers grow stronger and she commands a herd of stray cats to take revenge on cat-calling male bikers. This awkward spectacle is not illuminated by the dialled-up description of the cats as thickening into “clots like crystal in a test tube”, and eventually flowing together “into a particoloured sea, a sea of mange and fallen nobility”.
These cats might have run straight out of the world of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese film-makers with a genius for emotionally resonant fantasy world-building. Bird Life sets out to harness a playful ambiguity about exactly what’s going on as a way to explore links between trauma and insight, extreme talent and mental breakdown. Towards the end of the novel, there is an abrupt change of tack, as speaking animals give way to lyrical descriptions of sex and violence. The characters’ tragedies feel mannered and evasive. The lasting impression is not of Yasuko’s powers and Michael’s brilliance, but of a different kind of performance. When the peacock closes the “life-occluding shutter of its lid”, or cute facts about Brahms and frogs appear in Michael’s mouth, the characters are obscured by the intrusive hand of the author.
• Bird Life by Anna Smaill is published by Scribe (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
