Discuss how James Moloney uses the image of the Osprey throughout the novel? What does it represent?
‘With it’s sight restored at last, the bird jerked it’s head sideways to look at Carl and then Joy, as though it was asking, is it true? Am I free?’ James Moloney uses the image of the osprey in several ways throughout the novel. The main technique in which it is represented, is the emotion of the characters finally feeling free in there own way.
The first use of the image of the osprey is shown when Carl’s mother Kerry would always leave to go on one of her ‘holiday’s’. I believe that she went on these holidays to make herself feel free. To go away for a few days and leave her real life. But in fact she was never really free. Even on her holidays she always knew that she would eventually have to come back to reality, to her children. It’s not that she didn’t love her kids, she did. Perhaps she just couldn’t handle the stress of having to raise three children as a single parent or maybe just having them around was holding her back. During the prelude of the novel an unknown women gets on board a bus. She waits out of sight and sneaks on the bus when the driver is pre-occupied. She does not have a ticket and no one knows who she is. ‘The driver gunned the engine, commanding its throaty roar and the bus pulled away from the roadhouse into the sea of darkness. Only then did the women sit up and permit herself a smile’ At the end of the novel we find out that this women was Kerry. She was on her way back to her children when the bus she was on drowned into the ocean. In the moment that Kerry died, came the realization that she knew she was finally free.
Sarah, Carl’s sister also finds the courage to leave and set herself free. Free from living her own life. Since Sarah was old enough to remember she would always have to depend on herself not her mother. When her mother would leave she would have to look after Carl