Book review | Bird of Paradise
By Ada Leverson | Published by Michael Walmer
When you discover a book you love it's like finding a hidden gem. When you discover an author you love it's like finding the gem is part of a necklace.
So when you find a publisher whose whole list consists of just the sort of books you want to read, beautifully and colourfully produced, it's like finding a treasure-trove.
Enter Michael Walmer Books.
I discovered this publisher through bloggers such as #FurrowedMiddlebrow on Instagram, and @NeglectedBooks on Twitter: readers with whom I share the sneaking suspicion that time is the real judge of a good book. Most books fall out of print so when a handful are rediscovered and republished decades later it's a guarantee of something special.
Having previously read the travelogue Eve in Egypt (Stella Tennyson Jesse), Letters to a Friend (Winifred Holtby), and Living Alone (Stella Benson), my latest choice from Michael Walmer Books was Bird of Paradise by Ada Leverson, originally published in 1914, republished in 2023.
On one level it’s a complete hoot:
‘It was generally supposed that the late Sir Percy Kellynch had been knighted by mistake for somebody else, through a muddle owing to somebody’s deafness.’
Bird of Paradise perfectly evokes a sense of the last sun-rays and light breezes of the Edwardian summer swallowed up for good by World War One. We enter the domain of three, young, upper-class couples and the complicated power-play between them, which surprisingly reminded me of the 1960s and John Updike’s Couples.
Look beneath that level however and there's a hint of what someone once said about the art of Jane Austen's novels:
‘It's all like a beautiful, stylised dance on a perfectly manicured lawn, but if you don’t get your permanent partner before dark, the wolves hiding in the surrounding trees will come and get you.’
I won’t spoil the story of what ultimately happens in Bird of Paradise.
What ultimately happened to me, of course, was I got straight back on the Michael Walmer website and ordered another Ada Leverson novel.
Author: Ada Leverson
