![]() ![]() ![]() Into this comes the book’s third voice, Crow: anarchic, terrible, violent, careless. She was there one day and gone the next, in the manner of one who commits suicide, although the cause of her death is never made quite plain. The mother’s death has been sudden, a swift and terrible loss. The “boys”, whose voices are not distinguished from each other, speak for childhood and the loss of childhood. “Dad” is an author struggling to finish the book he is writing (for a “scruffy, Manchester-based publisher”), Ted Hughes’s “Crow” on the Couch: a Wild Analysis. ![]() So Max Porter, in his debut novel, comes sidelong at the story: creating a parallel world in which a father cares for his two small children after the death of his wife. All these things are visions, imagined versions of what went on in that marriage and after it, for the past is wholly vanished and can never be recovered. ![]() The marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath is such a story – two poetic giants powerfully attracted and repelled like the poles of magnets Plath’s suicide in the freezing winter of 1963 Hughes’s eternal punishment for her death, bound like Prometheus to the rock. Their reality already has the ring of myth. There are certain stories that seem to bear limitless retelling. ![]()
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