about me

My name is Finn Millar. I live in Weardale in the North Pennines. 'The Red Bird' is my first book. I have a PhD in Chinese Literature and am also a singer/songwriter with the band Shay Tal. I love animals, travel and adventures. I've got a dog and a green bird.
'The Red Bird' is a mystery story - the adventure of two Storytellers: Orlando de la Tour and his wayward apprentice, Rosa, the Red Bird. When Rosa becomes lost in her own wild story, it's Orlando's task to find her, helped by the mysterious Storytellers' Guild.
The book is available from Authorhouse, Amazon and from me.
It will appeal to readers of 'Sophie's World'.
Although The Red Bird is a mystery/adventure story in its own right, the underlying themes are more complex. They involve the way it is possible to create a reality, a whole world for oneself without realising it, to the extent of becoming absorbed into it. This theme dictates the entire structure and the various styles of the book; it is also referred to directly in the stories told by Orlando and Rosa, the Red Bird – for instance in the tragic tale Rosa narrates about Congreve and his friend Adome.

There are three stories running concurrently in the novel: mine, Orlando’s and Rosa’s. In all these stories a different narrative style is employed. Orlando’s stories, with which the book begins, are told in Orlando’s style – simple, slow, staccato and childlike – reflecting Orlando’s view of life. Rosa’s stories are much more involved and so is her style – more racy, with long, complicated sentences that often go off at a tangent, frequent digressions from the main storyline in order to make a philosophical point, a reckless disregard for narrative structure, indicating a much wilder imagination, and a casual overview of human problems and relationships which reflects her disinterested view of human affairs resulting from the fact of being a bird. By the climactic end of Part I, the three narratives have become completely intertwined, with Rosa’s story dominant. In Part II, Rosa’s story takes on a life of its own, and the style changes again. From now on the action develops at an ever-increasing pace, moving from continent to continent, from jungle to desert, from mountains to prairies, taking wild twists and turns that only Rosa herself could have imagined. The book is thus not only a story but also an allegory: of how reality is constructed and also of the art of storytelling itself.

I decided to write the above exposée in response to several comments on the slow start to the book, in order to encourage readers to go further than the first chapter. You could, for instance, have a look at Chapter 11 for an example of the way the book develops.

In writing the book, I often read it aloud, since I wanted to produce a work that would sound good orally. This technique also helped with style and rhythm, and I’ve produced an audio version read by myself which sounds very good.

The Red Bird was not intended to be a book for children; what I hoped was that it would appeal to people of any age.

favourite books

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy
Tolkien
Umberto Eco
Mario Vargas Llosa
Isabel Allende
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lu Xun
The Chinese classic novels Monkey, Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin
Raymond Chandler
Ben Okri
Ursula le Guin
Jostein Gaarder
Carlos Casteneda
Orhan Pamuk
Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
G.K. Chesterton, particularly 'The Napoleon of Notting Hill', 'The Man who was Thursday' and the Father Brown stories
Dylan Thomas
T.S. Eliot
Albert Camus
Jean-Paul Sartre
Franz Kafka
Gogol
Dostoevsky
Turgenev
Flann O’Brien
Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science
Kristin Ekman
Tove Jansson
John Steinbeck
Ernest Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Philip Pullman

my websites