Colleen Mondor Reviews The Parliament by Aimee Pokwatka

The Parliament, Aimee Pokwatka (Tordotcom 978-1-250-82097-6, $27.99, 320pp, hc) January 2024.

Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film The Birds was based, a bit, on a Daphne du Maurier short story of the same name which itself was inspired by du Maurier’s experience seeing a farmer attacked by a flock of seagulls. (If you never saw The Birds, head to YouTube for the phone booth scene.) Author Aimee Pokwatka takes the notion of murderous birds to a whole new level with The Parliament, her novel of a small-town West Virginia public library under siege from a massive flock of fiercely homicidal owls. The action is centered on a group of about two dozen adults and children trapped in the building while surrounded by tens of thou­sands, (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of the suddenly unpredictable animals. How people cope in such a situation is what drives the plot, along with the increasingly frantic search for a way to get out of the library alive.

Early on the birds are sighted outside but noth­ing seems concerning until one of them breaks through a window like a little feral missile and then someone walks outside and does not come back. (Does. Not. Come. Back.) Then a macho guy thinks all of this being afraid of birds is nonsense and you know what is going to happen to him (the macho guys never disappoint), and just like that Pokwatka has set up a situation where there are a lot of people trapped inside hoping the authorities on the outside will figure out how to deal with something that no one has ever had to deal with before (other than Tippi Hedren and the other fictional denizens of Bodega Bay, California in Hitchcock’s movie). In other words, the patrons of Elmswood Public Library are doomed if they don’t figure out how to save themselves.

Fortunately, chemist Madigan Purdy (‘‘Mad’’ for short), was persuaded by her old friend Farrah to teach a weekend class to some middle schoolers at the library and she quickly focuses on the scientific implications of the birds’ behavior. Another old friend, Nash, is also present and a capable doctor, and there is a book group with an assorted col­lection of skills that all come in handy and over a period of increasingly desperate days, the best and worst comes out in everybody as they stay alive and research what to do. In big and small ways everyone becomes frustrated, terrified, and occasionally obnoxious (who can blame them?), but they also knuckle down and direct their atten­tion to the task at hand. While the power flickers, the food gets low, the Wi-Fi fails, and the folks who are supposed to save them prove themselves to be colossally unprepared to do anything right (they resort to poisonous gas and setting the build­ing on fire – I am not kidding), everyone inside starts reading. This is when a plan starts to come together, just in the knick of time.

Action in The Parliament moves very quickly, with the mysterious threat posed by the owls growing larger as the hours, and days, tick by. Mad is an unlikely protagonist, uncertain in her sud­den position as teacher and uncomfortable in her hometown, which harbors the memories of her best friend, Nash’s brother, who was killed in front of her in a classroom shooting. Trauma is evident among others as well and the author hints that the birds might affect that, lending another element to the narrative. There is also a dark fantasy story, The Silent Queen, that Mad identified with as a child and finds on a library table and reads to the students as a distraction. (That text is interspersed with the novel.) It carries its own message of grief and monsters and serves as an inspiration in more ways than one.

Although science rules much of the day, as everyone’s research yields all sorts of interesting ideas, don’t expect Pokwatka to provide any easy answers. In fact The Parliament ends with some lingering questions which makes sense because no one is ever going to know why a bunch of birds get together, get angry, and get deadly. It is the stuff of fantasy, mostly, but how all the humans react reads almost like a news story. Let’s just say Mad and everyone else were lucky to be trapped in a library with a good book collection where they could study their own way to safety. That’s a lesson from The Silent Queen as well; sometimes the savior is you and the rescuing starts when you are ready to get it done.

This review and more like it in the December and January 2023 issue of Locus.

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