The Weight Of A Thousand Feathers

Seventeen year old Bobby Seed is a carer. His mum has MS, his brother’s unlabelled but almost certainly somewhere on the autistic spectrum, and Dad is a distant memory not worth a mention. Only two things change, really, to give this story some kind of structure: Bobby reluctantly joins a carer’s group for young people in a similar situation, and his mum decides she want to die. This might not seem like a promising premise for a story: unutterably depressing, gloomy, with enormous scope for maudlin. But The Weight Of A Thousand Feathers is none of these things. It’s by turns hilarious, breathtakingly suspenseful and deeply, deeply moving. I can honestly say this is one of the truest and most genuinely profound books I have read, on the theme of love. Because Bobby loves his mum, deeply and truly, and also his annoying but sensitive, vulnerable and surprisingly perceptive little brother Daniel (actual age: 13-14; developmental age: maybe 10, apart from when it comes to computer games). The relationships between the three of them are handled with incredible sensitivity and insight. These people feel real, at a level rarely achieved in fiction. We feel Bobby’s exhaustion, at the constant, never-ending drudgery of chores. We know his isolation, his distance from the normal stuff teenagers get up to at school and in their social and personal lives. We feel his conflicted emotions, as he performs the most intimate of caring tasks for his increasingly incapacitated and incontinent mum; how he carries them out with gentleness and care, but also with unhappy detachment. And then experiences guilt, because he would love to reassure his mum in some way, take away her mortification and shame, but finds himself rigid and unable to respond in that way. The complexities, pain and intensity of such a very close relationship are written beautifully, with rare empathy for all the people involved. The decision Bobby then has to make regarding his mum’s wishes is of course all the more agonizing because of the clarity with which their relationship is realized. Ultimately, the resolution is beautiful in many many ways, and handled exactly right by author, Bobby, Daniel and Mum: a heartbreaking, inevitable yet perfect outcome. Not least because of Bobby’s developing ability as a poet. No expert on poetry, I felt his poems were mostly pure and spare, with the odd very slightly clunky turn of phrase (which I suspect is deliberate, and a nod to his age). Whatever. They express his pain and love absolutely beautifully, in a way plain prose can rarely achieve. This is a beautiful book. Yes, it deals with important “issues:” euthanasia, burgeoning homosexuality, even the injustice of children being obliged to perform a caring role, which is generally given remarkably little recognition in literature or anywhere else. But this is far, far more than an “issues” book. Highly, highly recommended.