The Birds and Other Stories

The Birds and Other Stories Review

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds is one of the most famous horror films ever made, and it has done considerable damage to du Maurier’s reputation — not by being better than the story it is based on, but by being so different from it that readers who have seen the film first come to the original expecting something it deliberately refuses to provide. The film has a heroine, a romance, a San Francisco setting, a near-resolution in which the birds pause and survival seems possible. Du Maurier’s story has none of these things. It is set in rural Cornwall, its protagonist is a farmhand named Nat Hocken, and it ends with the birds still coming, the radio silent, the boarded-up farmhouse holding for now, and no suggestion that it will hold for long.

The refusal of explanation is the key. Hitchcock’s birds are disturbing partly because of the specific staging of the attacks — the schoolchildren running across the playground, the birthday party — but also partly because we sense, watching, that there is a cause we do not yet know, and the familiar apparatus of horror film (the explanation, the expert, the solution) will eventually arrive. Du Maurier’s birds have no cause and no explanation is offered. The east wind changes, and the birds attack. They continue to attack. There is no one who knows why, no information that could change what is happening, no agency available to the people in the farmhouse except to board up the windows and wait. This is a fundamentally different kind of dread from Hitchcock’s — less spectacular, more persistent, and considerably harder to put down.

The other stories in the collection demonstrate that “The Birds” is not an accident of mood but the expression of a consistent aesthetic. Du Maurier’s short fiction is interested in the uncanny as a mode distinct from the supernatural: not the intrusion of the impossible into the everyday, but the revelation that the everyday always contained something wrong that the characters had been not seeing. “Don’t Look Now” — perhaps her greatest story — works through this mechanism with extraordinary control: the grief at its centre is entirely realistic, the Venice setting is entirely realistic, and the horror, when it arrives, is not a departure from psychological realism but an expression of it.

The collection as a whole establishes du Maurier as a writer whose deepest imaginative territory was not the Gothic romance of country houses and doomed loves — though she was very good at that — but the experience of the world becoming suddenly, irreversibly strange. The strangeness in these stories is never resolved, never explained, and never domesticated. It simply remains, after the final page, which is exactly the effect du Maurier was after.

Don’t Look Now

“Don’t Look Now,” the second great story in this collection, demonstrates that “The Birds” is not an isolated achievement but the expression of a consistent aesthetic. The story follows John and Laura, a couple grieving their young daughter, who travel to Venice and encounter a pair of sisters — one of whom is blind and claims to be psychic — who tell Laura her daughter is happy. The story’s mechanics are entirely realistic: the grief is realistic, the Venice setting is realistic, the psychic sisters are ambiguous rather than supernatural. The horror, when it comes in the story’s final moments, emerges not from the intrusion of the impossible but from the terrible logic of everything that preceded it.

Nic Roeg’s 1973 film adaptation, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, is one of the most faithful and brilliant literary adaptations in cinema — a rare case where the film equals its source in a different medium. But du Maurier’s story, read without knowledge of the ending, delivers the same final shock through the compression and precision of prose that Roeg achieves through editing. The two works together are a useful demonstration of what a great story can do that a great film cannot, and vice versa.

The Range of the Collection

The other stories in the collection — “The Apple Tree,” “Monte Verità,” “The Old Man,” “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” — demonstrate that du Maurier’s range in short fiction was wider than the Gothic romance label suggests. “The Apple Tree” is a study in marital resentment that transforms slowly into something uncanny without ever fully becoming supernatural. “The Old Man” is a fable that withholds its revelation — that the family observed are seabirds, not humans — until the very end, requiring a reread that transforms the whole. Each story practises a different mode of the uncanny: the inexplicable, the retrospectively ominous, the revelation that changes nothing and everything.

Du Maurier wrote short stories throughout her career alongside her longer fiction, and the form suited a particular aspect of her imagination that the novel’s scale sometimes diffused. The concentration required by the short story — every sentence carrying weight, no room for atmospheric accumulation — brought out a precision in her prose that her best novels achieve in their climactic passages.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — These stories establish du Maurier as a master of the uncanny rather than merely the Gothic romance she is often reduced to — works of compressed, understated dread that refuse the explanations of horror and insist on the more disturbing fact of the inexplicable.