The Weight of a Thousand Feathers
Life is arduous and complex for Bobby, the novel’s seventeen-year-old narrator. His mother, Anne, is dying from MS and he is her carer, in addition to looking after his younger brother who has intellectual difficulties. Bobby’s best ‘pal’ Bel, reminiscent of the superbly indomitable Michelle Malloy in Conaghan’s novel When Mr Dog Bites, hopes that their relationship can develop. Bobby, however, is gay and attracted to Lou, an American from the support group for young carers they both attend.
This work, like Mr Dog, expertly and illuminatingly combines gravity and hilarity, as exemplified by the exchanges between Bobby and his mum, where pain and desperation are made more bearable through the characters’ deprecating banter in which often excoriating wit undercuts any tendency towards mawkishness, while beautifully illustrating the fierce, instinctive love and understanding between mother and son. This intimacy underpins Anne’s plea that Bobby end her life. Mercy killing is not a new theme in teenage fiction: Aidan Chambers featured it in Postcards from No Man’s Land, albeit in a more sanitised form. But in this largely adroit narrative it reads like an adjunct to the text rather than an organic aspect of it. The theme is intimately bound up with the enigmatic Lou, whose abrupt and unsatisfactory exit from the novel suggests authorial convenience. Yet this remains a powerfully evoked portrayal of the love, depth and capability of the young, qualities that equip them wonderfully for the adult world.
