While the first story offers mysteries, the second, ‘Little Buddhas Everywhere’, introduces primary characters and pivotal incidents from the past. In Claire Delaney’s memories, we find ‘progressive dinners, curry nights, fondues and fire pots’ shared by a social set of white heterosexual couples. The women in the group are affected differently by the feminist movement, with most rebelling against norms: Erris channels Jay Gatsby at a fancy dress party, dancing with ‘flame-haired’ Delia Harper; Annie Darkley makes a startling announcement at a dinner party before abandoning her family; Jeanie Tarrant neglects her duties as wife and mother in expeditions to Bailey’s Wood. Others carry out quiet struggles that end in capitulation, or cling to the gendered roles of a marriage even after it has ended.

It is tempting to interpret feminism and misogyny as the principle concerns of Murmurations, but this assumption is under cut through, in one story, the wielding of abuse by a woman. Botched attempts at liberation can equally be interpreted as failure in the dreams characters have about their lives. Lefevre’s more pressing intention is signalled by the yoking together of strategies inspired by art and biology. In sustaining two disparate and competing orientations – one towards isolation or absence, the other towards empathy or presence – tension is generated, attention compelled, and ethical complacency challenged. It is a brilliant manoeuvre.

Carol Lefevre

Lefevre writes in the acknowledgments that the novella is set in ‘the daunting urban landscapes’ of paintings by Edward Hopper, ‘pictures in which absence is as compelling and eloquent as presence’. The whole is ekphrastic, with each story a response to an individual work of art. In some, the painting remains as a trace; in others, the equivalence is striking. In ‘After the Island’, Emily visits a self-service café, the scene reproducing Hopper’s Automat (1927) with uncanny precision: a young woman in a green coat turns inward in contemplation, one ungloved hand lifting a ‘chunky’ china cup; the room and her plate are empty, the empty chair at her table foregrounded; the reflected lights in the window behind her stretch into a dark infinity.

Faithful to this mood, Lefevre has created places that could be anywhere in the Western world. While the setting in each story is established through precise details in wildlife, vegetation and cultural habit, the author unsettles recognition by drawing these elements from different regions. Without place names and in shifting terrain, we are un-homed, exiled from the familiar.

Alienation and absence are countered by an appeal to what connects us as humans: ‘The change in the behavioural state of one animal affects and is affected by that of all other animals in the group, no matter how large the group is’ (the epigraph). A murmuration is a large group of birds, typically starlings, that fly as one and change direction together. It is also the act of doing this – noun and verb.

How might the simultaneous movements of a flock of birds translate into human behaviour? Lizbie Menick understands disaster as ‘dumb fate’, ‘the swerving patterns you can never see’; in reflecting on her life, Jeanie Tarrant believes ‘it only takes the slightest shift in purpose to spin a life off course’, then ‘countless lives soar and plunge amid trails of sparks and burning debris’. Moreover, memory is revealed as fallible, the ‘truth’ of past actions grounded in assumptions and personal prejudice, while malevolence is active in the fates of several of the characters.

The narrative increasingly pivots on intertwining acts of kindness and courage. In the first story, Emily recalls learning to read from the Hippocratic Oath, and resolving to honour its motto: ‘First, do no harm’. Actual and metaphorical birds and cages are invoked with cumulative urgency, while seemingly peripheral characters are called to respond to the mystery of Erris Cleary. In the final story, it is a writer’s task to strike ‘one true note’ that might crack ‘the obliterating silence’ of failure and shame. In summoning what is best in a writer, Lefevre is modelling the impulse to imagine and empathise, and the capacity to maintain – even through discouragement – hope, humility, and resolve.

In Murmurations, the strategies Carol Lefevre deploys are ethical as well as creative, and are informed by intelligent compassion. Even if we can never truly know one another, Lefevre suggests that the attempt to connect is imperative. We might know the states that unite us in flashes of grace; we might be moved when the flock turns as one.