Product Description

When a boy named Will meets Alice, he can't believe his luck. She's smart, sexy and, much to Will's surprise, in love with him. Alice brings meaning to his urban existence and his McJob. But the course of modern love did never run smooth and soon devotion leads Will to something darker. Elsewhere in the city Helen is an actress. Or she will be one day. For now she finds work as a model. She used to be called Clair, but she wants to be something new and she can be anyone. She's an actress, remember.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75352 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-22
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
A blackly comic tale of awkward young love. --Guardian

Review
The Bird Room is an astonishingly good first novel. I was gripped from the first page. (M. J. Hyland)

A strangely merry look at the agony of true love. (Dazed and Confused)

The Bird Room is a beautiful Chinese puzzle of a novel. (Toby Litt)

Sparely written, cool, jaunty, darkly comic, with a sharp ear for voice and manner. (Guardian)

Chris Killen's first novel is either disturbingly brilliant or brilliantly disturbing. Whichever, I loved it. (Steven Hall)

A darkly stylish comedy of sexual manners. (Metro)

Beautiful, laconic and chockablock with uneasy sex - like having a threesome with your girlfriend and Richard Brautigan. (Richard Milward)

3:AM Magazine
A very good book. Says something deep and often unspoken about the human condition . . . like a Jarvis Cocker chorus.

Customer Reviews

bleak, funny and claustrophic - an excellent first novel
This is an intruiging novel about insecurities, alienation, and relationships, from a promising first-time author.

The language is sparse and considered and accurate; even in the midst of misery and depression, there's nuggets of sharp black humour and witty observation. Killen's minimalist style lends the work feel of a collection of related short stories, or vignettes: bleak snippets of the characters' lives that build into a disconcerting and compelling whole. The projections of the characters' social anxieties were almost tangible, and made me feel physically uncomfortable while reading. The author rapidly sketches out the fear and panic and pain that Will and Helen experience without getting too involved and bogged down in heavy detail, and his use of dark comedy prevents the novel from becoming too claustrophobic. The immediacy of the text is its strength.

A highly accomplished first novel; very readable; a definite recommendation.

Nothing special
This book has one or two things going for it (including the odd humorous moment), but I couldn't really say that it did a whole lot for me. It's interesting to see the main character's paranoia being conveyed via the narrative, but it just didn't really seem to go anywhere particularly worth bothering with. Sorry if I'm getting up on my ivory horse, but (despite the curiously unsourced quotations that hype things up on the cover) I found it to be superficial and instantly forgettable. I am sure there are those who will regard this as being a triumphant example of thought-provoking post-modern literature. However, it left me feeling about as cold as an inhospitable female's reproductive tract.

How much did they slip Litt and Hyland for their blurbs?
Clive James once said that to be a lousy writer takes energy: average novelists remain unread not for being bad, but for being flat. Although written with Judith Krantz in mind, the same applies to Chris Killen.

The trouble is that the tale's too similar to the teller. It's like those ghosts in folk tales - caught between worlds, adrift, and affectless. It's no accident that words such as 'ghost', 'insubstantial', and 'absent' threaten to crowd out the words such as 'and', 'the' and 'then'. Will, the main character attracts such comparisons the way magnets attract iron filings. Even Will's love interest Helen/Clair, ostensible actress and actual prostitute in denial, gets a hint of this: 'There's this blankness to him, as if he's a more an idea than an actual person.'

So with the novel. With the interior monologue turned to full volume, all externals are drowned out. Oddly, it's the everyday things that pierce Will's solipsism: shopping at Tesco Express, chipped Ghostbusters II mugs, notes to record trashy films on Channel 5. Little happens and little is felt, least of all by Will or us.

The Bird Room is scrappy, unsatisfying, and more of an outsized short story than a novel. There had to be easier ways for Canongate to squander its Life of Pi money than this.