I chose Belinda Bauer’s The Impossible Thing to read for ReadingWales’26 March event by BookerTalk. To take part in this event, we need to read a book from any genre written by an author from Wales. Belinda Bauer presently lives in Wales, where before turning to fiction writing, she was a court reporter at Cardiff and several of her books are set in Wales. She is an acclaimed award winning author. This was my first book by her. I picked up the book because it has a compelling story—beautifully written with engaging good guys, perfectly woven storylines with an evocative sense of place. It bills itself a crime novel—it is that but it is also a story of moral awakening of a young woman. It is also a tale of one stubborn determined bird.
The story is set in dual timelines—The first part is set in the twenty years between the two world wars in northern Yorkshire by the rock cliffs over the coast of North Sea. The second part takes place in present-day rural Wales. There are two protagonists in each section— a girl and a bird in one; two 20something men in the other. The thread that connects the two parts is theft of bird eggs and their trafficking (legal and illegal) to traders and collectors. The narrative switches back and forth between the two timelines.
The cracks on the cliffs of Yorkshire, where the story starts, are nesting grounds for millions of seabirds—“Gulls and fulmars and guillemots and puffins and gannets and kittiwakes and razorbills…every one of them drawn back every summer to the same face, the same place, the same tiny ledge, where it would lay its eggs and raise its chicks”. For the “climmers”, going down on the rope along the cliff face, four or five times a day, collecting 40 to 50 eggs per day, from March to July and selling them to traders and brokers gathered on the cliff top was lucrative, more lucrative than laboring on the farm. There was money to be made on each and every egg but colorful large eggs fetched the highest price. Stealing eggs from the nests and selling them for highest bidder was legal then and there was no moral qualms about either. Many farms along the cliff top lived well on stolen eggs but not the Sheppards of Metland farm. Their farm, unfortunately ended on an overhang which made it impossible to rope down the cliff wall and pluck eggs from under the birds. But the overhang had a crack through which a very tiny body could pass.
While rest of the family toiled on the farm, Celie Sheppard, a six year old with a body so small that a wind could actually blow her away, takes the desperate risk to rope down through the crack in the overhang to steal some eggs because she wanted to eat omelettes.
“She could see hundreds of birds pressed against the cliff-face. And, as they shifted about, glimpses of eggs of every size and colour that she could imagine. They had chickens in the yard, of course, but they laid dull little brown eggs, and never enough to eat, only for selling. These eggs were two or three times that size, and speckled and spotted and splattered with brown and black on backgrounds that ranged from cream, through blue to green. Celie had never had a toy, but the thought of holding such eggs in her little hands made her nearly smile, with a feeling that was beyond hunger”.
When she ‘climmed’ the first time and got her first egg “ even though she had no way of knowing that night—wouldn’t understand for a good while—that was the egg that would change her life”. It was a guillemot egg—“ red in color, a deep, tapestry red, but grew lighter as it rose from the base, fading to a pretty pink blush at the very point. There was not a mark on it. Not a spot nor a squiggle to sully the perfection”. An “impossible thing”, this Metland egg as it came to be known, the one that would sell for £20, promised more if Celie brought one up the cliff top every year. Guillemots are creatures of habit—every year they nest on the same spot, lay the same colored egg and do so for thirty years. This bird too comes every year to the same “doomed” home to lay its egg and watch it taken away. In the struggle between survival and dominance, between the predator and victim, even a puny, scrawny child has more power than a bird. Does the bird feel the loss of its egg? Here is how the author describes it when the bird sees Cecie coming down the cliff:
For the first time, the bird seemed to know what was about to happen. It did not flap. Flapping had never worked. It did not squawk, for squawking was pointless. It did not peck, for that had never stopped the thief. If birds can learn, it had learned. This time the bird just watched Celie approach… All around them a thousand guillemots shrieked warnings, and here and there exploded from the cliff in whirring sparks of chocolate wings. While this bird just watched her, and waited. Under its downy breast she could already see the prize. A tiny shock of red on the shaded wall. The bird shifted and the egg disappeared, and now there was nothing to distinguish this guillemot from any one of the thousand others under the Metland overhang. As if it knew it could not fight her, but hoped it might still deceive her…Gently, Celie reached under the bird. It turned its head away a degree, and half opened its beak and made a low grunt that Celie felt more than heard. Carefully she placed the egg in the satchel and tapped the rope. The bird sat and watched her all the way.
Celie steals thirty eggs from that one guillemot over a period of fifteen years. She even becomes a minor celebrity; every summer tourists from all over England coming to watch her bring up that perfect red egg for everyone to ooh and aah over it. Yet, the author does not allow her to become a heartless waif. One summer she says no to climming and that’s when the collector and the thirty eggs disappear.
In the present day in The Brecon Beacons, Wales, Patrick Fort and Weird Nick, are trying to figure out why and who stole a wooden box containing a red egg that Nick had found in the attic. He had tried to sell it on eBay (because he needed the money for a gaming chair) but his listing is taken down since selling wild birds’ egg is illegal and then someone burgles his house and steals it and now Nick wants to get it back. Patrick is neurodivergent and Nick, a misfit, and both are living with their mothers. But they are sweet likeable characters and their interaction with each other is often lol funny. Their sleuthing exposes them to the world of illegal egg trafficking—a chronic egg thief, a vigilante officer of Royal Society of Protection of Birds and a curator of Museum of Natural History. Drawing inspiration from their Call of Duty slayings, they recover the thirty missing red Metland eggs, including Nick’s. In a scene that is almost cinematic, they metaphorically give the eggs back to the birds.
The Impossible Thing is based on a true story—the original Metland Egg, all thirty of them are still missing. In the fictional version, Bauer gives them a heartwarming resolution.The novel is about poverty, deprivation, greed and obsession. It is also about redemption and grace. Fittingly, the bird has the last word:
And yet.
Under one warm breast.
Nestled against one tiny heart . . .
A single, perfect, red egg.
