Fjords Reviews

Nonfiction
THE RAVENMASTER
My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London
by Christopher Skaife

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
256 pages
978-0-374-11334-6

Working in New York City leaves you with a peculiar relationship to birds. The urban setting strips some of the “wild” out of “wildlife.” Eventually even the “life” part starts to fade, and what we’re left with is scenery: unclean creatures, carrying the scent and colors of the city. Blending in on good days, making a nuisance of themselves on bad days. It’s a rare experience, to read a memoir thought-provoking enough to upend your attitude towards a constant—albeit neglected—presence in your everyday experience.

But that’s precisely what Christopher Skaife’s The Ravenmaster has done for me. The next time I get a close look at one of our city’s birds, I’ll wonder if there isn’t a faint glimmer of intelligence behind those bright eyes.

(Disclaimer: Ravens and pigeons are very different. Indeed, if Mr. Skaife is to be be-lieved, ravens aren't much like anything else on the planet.)

Christopher Skaife is a yeoman warder, a ceremonial guard at the Tower of London. Yeoman warders are former soldiers who've served (and served well) for at least 22 years. They preserve the history and traditions of the Tower; they’re not only guardsmen, but also storytellers and tour guides. Mr. Skaife enjoys a unique position among his peers: the Tower is home to seven ravens, and it's his job as official Ravenmaster to tend to these birds. Unsurprisingly, dark legends surround the Ravenmaster’s corvid charges. It is said that should a raven ever leave the Tower, Britain will fall.

A grim prospect. Still, Mr. Skaife's memoir left me with the impression he's motivated less by legends and more by a commitment to the birds themselves. He writes in straightforward, fast-paced prose; I particularly admire the way he pivots from point to point and chapter to chap-ter, covering a wide variety of subjects in a way that nonetheless feels natural. It creates the im-pression the memoir is organic and spontaneous, that what Mr. Skaife put on the page reflects his thoughts as they came to him; I suspect that sense of spontaneity is paradoxically the effect of meticulous planning and organization. In my daily reading life, I often encounter works that are difficult to place, hugely introspective, almost delirious in their commitment to language itself. This memoir brings us something seemingly rare: a practical man, more interested in fact than sentiment, describing a complicated life in straightforward terms.

Of Mr. Skaife’s many reflections on ravens, his observations on this haunting and com-plicated bird’s role in myths and storytelling struck me most. As The Ravenmaster points out, ravens have a hugely ambivalent place in the human imagination. Sometimes, they’re heroic, like the ravens who feed the prophet Elijah. But they’re villains just as often: Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven famously uses the eponymous bird as a figure of insurmountable grief and loss. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire—which Mr. Skaife mentions more than once—contains a startlingly cogent distillation of the various raven tropes; Martin’s ravens are messenger birds heavily associated with bad news, prophecy, and doomsaying, but arguably still serve the set-ting’s highest good. Naturally, Mr. Skaife discourages the use of ravens as messengers. They’re too smart, mercurial, and free-spirited to serve anyone in the long run.

Perhaps the ravens’ high intelligence and tough, survivalist mindset nurtures these sto—ries—stories in which ravens, for good or ill, exert an awesome power. The Tower’s ravens per-haps hold an even greater power; unsurprising, considering the Tower has a history as complex and mythologized as the raven. It’s been the setting of—not just ghost stories—but a surplus of real—life tragedies, such as the execution of Anne Boleyn. The memoir at one point quotes the historian Thomas Macaulay, who described the Tower’s chapel (St. Peter ad Vincula) as “the saddest place on earth.”

Yet despite its aura of dread, the Tower is Mr. Skaife’s home, and a source of joy and awe to its visitors. In that way, the Tower, its birds, and its legends are exemplary of all history, particularly the “story” part. A shared past, however grim, gives us a common context. As a young American citizen observing political waters about as choppy as I’ve ever seen, I found this memoir—with its window into the established yet evolving traditions of another country—strangely comforting. I am similarly moved by Mr. Skaife’s dedication to his role. The meaning he's found in his work contains a hint for the reader, some subtle but sage advice on how to find one’s footing on shifting ground.

But, of course, the Ravenmaster isn’t a self-help book, or even a history. It’s the story of Christopher Skaife and his relationship to these very challenging—but also hugely rewarding—ravens, and an excellent offset to the winter’s gloomy early nights.