All the Birds in the Sky

The debut novel of Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky, blends fantasy with sci-fi, putting witches, magical trees, talking birds, mad scientists, time machines, and doomsday devices all inside the same story, but with mixed results: the fantastical elements can impress us with their creativity, leaving us with a feeling of wonder, but they also end up drawing too much attention to themselves, sometimes hiding the touching love story that should have been the focus of the narrative.

The novel has two main characters, Patricia and Laurence, and starts to follow their point of view when they are just kids meeting each other at school, right after having life-altering experiences. Patricia has just discovered the power to speak with animals: a bird talked to her, led Patricia to a nearby forest, and revealed to her that she’s a witch. Laurence, in turn, has just discovered how to create a time machine using his father’s watch, but the machine only makes him travel two seconds to the future.

One of the novel’s greatest strengths is the voice of its narrator, who describes every bizarre event that happens with Patricia and Laurence without showing too much wonderment. Patricia talks to a bird and Laurence creates a time machine and these two events are treated with the most absolute normality by the narrator, as if they weren’t absurd or fantastical at all. The fantastic is presented to us nonchalantly, as if the bizarre things the kids are doing are just part of the natural order of things, which gives the book its initial charm:

“He stole his dad’s old waterproof wristwatch and combined it with some parts he scavenged from a bunch of microwave ovens and cell phones. And a few odds and ends from the electronics store. At the end of all this, he had a working time machine that fit on his wrist.”

Laurence creates a time machine and that’s it. There is no pause to wonder at the absurd nature of his achievement: he created it, now he’s using it, and life goes on. By treating the fantastic with normality, the narrative, paradoxically, makes it feel even more bizarre, establishing it as the norm in a world that otherwise appears to be just like our own.

The book begins like a fairy tale as Patricia meets a Parliament of Birds and talks to a tree that tells her that she’s special: magic appears to be just around the corner. The next day, the events start to become “a sort of blur to Patricia,” who starts to remember them “mostly in dreams and fragments.”  Meanwhile, their thoughts regarding the events perfectly capture a child’s view of the world, displaying creativity and imagination: “You did not want Patricia’s mom mad at you, because she got mad for a living and was really good at it.”

Patricia and Laurence are put at the opposite ends of the narrative: she’s connected to nature and magic, while Laurence is connected to science and technology. At school, however, there are both outcasts, who don’t belong anywhere. And to make matters worse for them, their school counselor is a trained assassin that is hell-bent on destroying their lives after hearing from an oracle that they’re going to bring the end of the world.

Their friendship grows because they only have each other: Laurence is the only one who is open-minded enough to hear about her encounters with talking trees, while Patricia is the only one who cares about his megalomaniac projects, helping Laurence complete them, like creating a sentient artificial intelligence. They become close friends because they are the ones that always there for each other. Both of them, however, are still insecure, feeling vulnerable and wary that the other will finally judge them and go away: “But Patricia felt like both she and Laurence knew, in the deepest crevices of their hearts, that they would each ditch the other in a second, if they had a chance to belong, really belong, with a group of others like themselves.”

Growing up is not seen in a bright light: “When Laurence was old enough to do what he liked, he would be old enough to understand he couldn’t do what he liked, ” the narrator points out. But growing up is what they do: they both go their separate – but fantastical – ways, finding a group of others just like themselves. Patricia goes to a school for witches and Laurence meets other like-minded scientists who will try to build a portal to other worlds.

When they grow up, the novel has a great time-lapse, showing them already as adults, having jobs, paying bills, and thinking about sex. It’s not because they grew up, however, that the fantastic disappears from the narrative. Here, the book breaks expectations, and the fantastic is actually kicked up a notch.

Suddenly, there are too many characters, too many names, too many elements at work at the same time. There are dozens of flying witches and mad scientists, there are talking crows and wise ancient trees, huge robots and killing machines, two different types of magic, a great worry about aggrandizement, and even that school counselor which was not entirely wrong, because the end of the world is indeed coming: not brought by two individuals, but by everyone, with natural catastrophes finally happening and beginning to wipe out humanity from the face of the Earth. All this, unfortunately, buries Patricia and Laurence’s relationship under a huge amount of bizarre elements and events, shifting the focus from the characters toward them.

The novel is at its best when it’s able to mix character development and fantasy together without sacrificing a thing. When it shows the characters’ insecurities and personal problems contextualized in a peculiar manner:

“He’d dated Ginnifer, an electrical engineer with a wicked smile, during sophomore and junior years in college, and she would devise contraptions that could stimulate Laurence’s prostate with varying levels of vibration while also enabling her to straddle his penis, and apply a similar variable-speed oscillation/vibrator function to her clitoris. Plus Ginnifer’s Sexoskeleton, which would take way too long to describe. But this was someone he’d known half his life, with whom he had this whole labyrinthine history. He could not screw this up. Plus Patricia might be used to crazy magic sex. She and the other witches probably turned themselves into bats and had bat sex one hundred feet up, or had sex on the spirit plane, or with fire elementals or whatever.”

That’s because the story, when stripped off of its eccentricities, follows a usual romance structure: boy meets girl, they eventually fall in love with each other, and they fight and break up and think they should have known better. The climax, then, is about reunion, understanding, and forgiveness. With All the Birds in the Sky, it’s no different, but the formula works because it’s mixed with fantasy and sci-fi, with a narrator that never stops showing creative ways to depict their inner conflicts.

But the novel is at its worst when it’s focusing only on the fantastic, forgetting about Patricia and Laurence. The problem here is that the story lacks a proper plot to glue everything together, so when it stops being a love story, things just kind of happen, with no urgency, tension, and purpose. The story is about Patricia and Laurence being together, and not about her magical powers or his great scientific intellect

The supporting characters are mostly bland and uninspiring. It’s difficult to remember what differentiates Patricia’s witch friends, for example. There are a couple of characters that stand out, like Patricia’s sister Roberta, and Laurence’s friend and mentor Isobel, but both are in the story right from the start. The characters that are introduced after they have grown up are all forgettable. There is a whole incident involving a woman named Prya, for example, which is supposed to be tense, but since she was barely introduced before the event, it’s hard for us to feel any real tension despite the desperation of one of the main characters. When another side character gets shot, for example, we have the same problem: one of the main characters is shocked and traumatized, but we are having trouble remembering who that side character even was.

Despite that, the novel still manages to impress with its creativity and heart. It tackles themes surrounding humanity’s selfishness, showing the world ending because of global warming, and puts two groups that are too proud to work together and talk to each other, being much more interested in trying to solve everything by themselves and even kill one another. Patricia and Laurence’s friendship began because they were there to hear each other. The world is ending because, eventually, they can’t stand to be around one another.

All the Birds in the Sky is a great novel that can get carried away by its most bizarre elements. At its heart, however, lies a simple message: it shows the benefit of listening to others, even if the “others” in question are a talking crow and a sentient machine.

April 08, 2020.