The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West

First published: 1966

Type of work: Political and historical thriller

Time of work: Early twentieth century

Locale: London, Paris, a French railway train, and a provincial French town

Principal Characters:

• Laura Rowan, an eighteen-year-old girl, who is half English and half Russian
• Count Nikolai Nikolaievitch Diakonov, a former Minister in the Czar’s government, living in exile in Paris
• Countess Sofia Andreievna Diakonova, his wife
• Tania Rowan, Laura’s mother, the Count’s daughter, living in London
• Edward Rowan, Laura’s father, an English Member of Parliament
• Vassili Iulevitch Chubinov, the son of a minor Russian aristocrat, an active revolutionary
• Alexander Gregorievitch Kamensky, also known as
• Gorin, and
• Kaspar, the Count’s secretary and confidant

The Novel

The elderly Count Nikolai Nikolaievitch Diakonov, a senior minister in the Russian government, has been exiled for reasons he cannot fathom and is now living in gloomy splendor in a Paris apartment with his wife, Countess Sofia Andreievna Diakonova, and a retinue of Russian family retainers. He is so consumed with bitterness and bewilderment about the mysterious circumstances of his exile—Is he, he wonders, a victim of a conspiracy, or is he going mad?—that he hardly notices that Sofia is seriously ill.

At the opening of the book, the Count’s beautiful daughter, Tania Rowan, and his eighteen-year-old granddaughter, Laura Rowan, are at their elegant London home, preparing to leave for Paris in order to look after Sofia. Before she leaves, Laura senses a tension between her mother and her father, Edward Rowan, a distinguished English politician, which may have something to do with Susie Stainton, her mother’s onetime protege.

At the Diakonov apartment, Alexander Gregorievitch Kamensky, the Count’s confidant and secretary, compliments Laura on her beauty and warns her to take care, because there are revolutionaries in the neighborhood who may be plotting against her grandfather’s life.

Laura accompanies the Count on a train journey to the coast, to visit some relatives, while Tania takes Sofia to the hospital. On the train, a young man with shabby clothing but noble bearing enters the compartment in a state of agitation. The Count recognizes him as Vassili Iulevitch Chubinov, the son of a minor Russian aristocrat. In his childhood, Chubinov regarded the Count as a second father, but, much to Laura’s alarm, he announces that he is now an active revolutionary. Laura begs him to leave the compartment, but the Count pricks up his ears when Chubinov tells him that he has proof of a conspiracy against him and that although they are on directly opposite sides of the political fence, they are both victims of the same conspiracy.

There follows a long conversation between the Count and Chubinov, taking up almost a quarter of the book, in which Chubinov recalls the details of his life over the past few weeks, an extraordinary history of deception, trickery, plot and counterplot, spies and counterspies, assassinations and murders, leading to the startling conclusion that there is a double agent in the Diakonov household. Further twists in the story reveal that the agent is Kamensky, who has a second identity as the revolutionary leader Gorin, and a third as Kaspar, a police spy for the Czar. In a state of shock, the Count decides to leave the train at the next station and to proceed to Moscow at once, to clear his name.

Chubinov warns Laura that her life, as well as Nikolai’s and his own, is now in danger. He had not anticipated her presence on the train, but Kamensky will know through his spies that she was there and will realize that she has learned about his treachery. He decides to return secretly to Paris to kill Kamensky before Kamensky can kill them. He gives her a secret contact address before he departs. On the platform, the Count becomes extremely ill. He and Laura are taken to a hotel in Grissaint. He dies during the night.

Laura fears that if she contacts her mother in Paris, Kamensky will learn of her whereabouts. She telegraphs her father in London instead. Terrified that every new face could mask a terrorist’s identity, she waits for his arrival with mounting tension. When a visitor arrives, she is horrified to find that it is not her father but Kamensky. She tells him that she was in a separate compartment on the train and knows nothing of the conversation with the stranger.

It is arranged that Kamensky will return to Paris with the Count’s body, and Laura will meet him in the Paris apartment at 4:00 P.M. the next day. Believing this to be her death assignment, she telegraphs the information to Chubinov. When her father finally arrives, he is too preoccupied with his own affairs to listen to her story. He settles down to write a long letter. She guesses that he is writing to Susie Stainton and is about to leave Tania.

In Paris the following afternoon, Chubinov shoots Kamensky on the pavement outside the Diakonov apartment. Laura hides the revolver in the one place the police will be sure not to search: her grandfather’s coffin. Chubinov flees to England. Tania, deserted by her husband, returns to Russia, taking Laura with her. Because of Chuboniv’s revelations, the Count’s good name has been restored and his family can be received in Moscow with full honors.

The Characters

The novel teems with highly individual characters, vividly brought to life. From the young footman, Louison, who finds himself involved in one of Kamensky’s deceptions, to the surgeon, Professor Saint-Gratien, who attends to the Count at the hotel and is responsible for Kamensky’s unexpected appearance there, each has a specific thread to weave into the complicated tapestry of events; each might be quite innocent or part of the conspiracy.

The book is dominated by the huge, imposing, tormented figure of Count Diakonov. A character of Old Testament proportions, he would have been altogether too weighty and portentous if the author had not provided the counterbalance of Laura, who consistently brings him down to earth with her wide-eyed practicalities and Alice-in-Wonderland sense of the absurd.

The Count is a fanatical devotee of the Russian Orthodox Church and of the Czar, whom he reveres as God’s representative on earth. His banishment is therefore more than a matter of physical displacement; it is a kind of excommunication. When he is dying, however (before he comes to a Job-like conciliation with his God), what hurts him most is his betrayal by the man he believed to be his only friend in a hostile world. For Chubinov, too, who had idolized Gorin as mentor and leader, the personal betrayal is more wounding than the betrayal of the cause.

Chubinov’s character is embedded in the traditions of Russian literature: the guilt-ridden young aristocrat who eschews wealth and position and suffers real privation in the cause of the poor, arguing his position in high-flown theoretical terms. In his long, shabby, ill-fitting overcoat, he cuts a ludicrous figure; his pathos and vulnerability arouse Laura’s sympathy and affection.

Kamensky, in his alter-ego role as Gorin, is, like Chubinov, a disciple of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. His justification for playing both sides at once—that a man can personify Hegelian dialectics by acting as thesis and antithesis and thereby producing his own synthesis—is an absurdity and it is unclear whether the author intends it as a specious rationalization or a serious explanation. The duality of his persona, however, is very well sign-posted and developed.

There is a poignant irony about his death. It has been made apparent to the reader that his excitement in the presence of Laura, which she takes to be murderous hatred, in fact stems from love. The assignment which she believes Kamensky will use to kill her is seen by him as an opportunity to propose marriage. It is also revealed that the proposed victim of Kamensky’s assassination plans was not Laura, but the Czar himself. Kamensky/Gorin thus proves to be the most obsessed and self-deluded of all the characters.

Rebecca West emphasizes, sometimes teasingly, the contrast between the Russians and the English, with the ritualistic, hidebound but profoundly emotional Count at one extreme and Edward Rowan, with his cold, businesslike efficiency, pragmatism, and intolerance, at the other.

Laura is a splendid and glowing fusion of the English and the Russian. The haughty politeness and practical common sense of her English nursery training is punctured with fiery outbursts and unexpected personal involvements. She is intelligent enough to follow every nuance of Chubinov’s complicated story, but emotionally and sexually she is completely naive and is quite unable to read the signs of Kamensky’s infatuation with her, even when Tania tries to draw her attention to them.

The author also points to a contrast between the behavior of the women, who deal with practicalities and respond to other people’s sensitivities, and the men, who, as perceived through Laura’s and Tania’s eyes, are selfishly and childishly absorbed in playing futile power games.

Critical Context

Rebecca West, journalist as well as essayist and novelist, became absorbed in the phenomenon of treason while observing and reporting on the trials of war criminals in London and Nuremberg after World War II, and in 1947 she published a full-length study, The Meaning of Treason. After the various spy revelations and trials of the subsequent decade, she published a revised edition, The New Meaning of Treason, in 1964. The Birds Fall Down fictionalized the ideas of the revised edition.

The novel itself, however, is only partly fictional. It is based on an actual series of events which came to light on a long train journey, ten years later than the one described in the novel, and across Germany rather than France. This historical conversation revealed that the head of the Russian Social Revolutionary organization, which had been responsible for the deaths of several leading czarist figures, was a paid czarist police spy. The effect of the real-life revelation was devastating to both sides. “From then on,” Rebecca West wrote in her preface to the novel, “the door of opportunity slowly swung open before the cool-headed Lenin,” an outcome which is echoed, peripherally, in the final stages of the novel.

Bibliography

Deakin, Motley. Rebecca West. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A useful introduction to the range of West’s work. Includes a chronology of West’s life and career and chapters on her as feminist, critic, journalist, historian, and novelist. A selected bibliography and an index are included.

Glendinning, Victoria. Rebecca West: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. The first full-length biography, it concentrates on West’s life, although there are brief and insightful discussions of her work. Written in cooperation with West’s family and friends.

Hutchinson, George Evelyn. The Itinerant Ivory Tower. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953. In a chapter entitled “The Dome,” Hutchinson explores the philosophical implications of West’s work.

Olrich, Mary Margarita. The Novels of Rebecca West: A Complex Unity, 1966.

Orel, Harold. The Literary Achievement of Rebecca West. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Similar in scope to Motley Deakin’s study (above), it includes chapters on her life, her literary criticism, her political and philosophical works, her novels, and her masterpiece, the historical work Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). Helpful notes, a bibliography, and an index are provided.

Rubin, Donald Stuart. The Recusant Myth of Modern Fiction, 1968.

Tindall, William York. Forces in Modern British Literature, 1885-1956. New York: Vintage Books, 1956. A standard study of the period, Tindall’s work helps to place West’s work in a literary context, although he does not deal with her fiction in any direct fashion.

West Rebecca. Rebecca West: A Celebration. New York: Viking Press, 1977. The introduction by Samuel Hynes has been one of the most influential pieces of West criticism. This volume contains generous selections from West’s major work.

Wolfe, Peter. Rebecca West. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. A thematic study, less well written and organized than the books by Motley Deakin and Harold Orel (above). Wolfe discounts the value of West’s fiction. Contains notes and a bibliography.

Wolfe, Verena E. Rebecca West: Kunsttheorie und Romanschaffen, 1972.