The Birds by Daphne du Maurier, in which large flocks of wild birds suddenly attack humanity in a systematic and highly organised way, was published in 1951. It has been somewhat overshadowed by the film that Alfred Hitchcock made from it in 1962. The story is actually rather darker than the film and read today seems startingly original, the precursor of the sort of ecological disaster science fiction produced by John Wyndham, J G Ballard and others in the later 1950s and early 1960s. It’s also been given a fresh relevance by the Covid emergency.
Du Maurier was reported not to like the film and after reading the story I can quite see why. The events are relocated to a sunny California and it all seems like a local problem. In the story, winter seems to come to the bleak Cornish landscape in the blink of an eye and it’s not clear at first if it is the weather that is making the birds behave in such an odd way.
There is a gradual, growing unease that this is not just a local problem. It turns out to be a national emergency, then perhaps a worldwide one. This progression is conveyed by the change in the radio broadcasts until the final silence. It has perhaps the darkest ending of any fiction apart from Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, in which humanity is wiped out by nuclear fallout.
The story is very much of its time, the post-war era of rationing, austerity and government control. Memories of the Plymouth blitz are still fresh and the main source of news is the wireless. Could it be that the Russians are somehow responsible for the aggressive behaviour of the birds?
It’s difficult at first to get the authorities to take the reports of the bird attacks seriously. Once they do, there is a fear that they will not act appropriately. After military aircraft have been shown to be ineffective against the massed birds, it becomes clear that the farm labourer and his family are on their own and must depend on themselves for survival. Order and civilisation are fragile and have broken down entirely under the onslaught of the birds.
It’s never really explained what might have caused nature to rise up against humankind in this way, whereas the film does hint at an explanation. One can’t help feeling that this story is somehow a response to the atomic bombs and the revelations about the concentration camps, the sense of living in a world that had changed utterly, but du Maurier leaves it open for readers to make up their own minds.
I myself think there is a link to Du Maurier’s Kiss Me Again Stranger and the idea in that story that Britain might not actually be entitled to claim the moral high ground over what took place during the recent war.
The Good Reader 