You’re unhappiest when you lose all desire to fulfill your destiny, to go after your dreams. This is the underlying premise of French author and playwright Frederic Mari’s The Shine.
The protagonist of this easy-to-read story from the heart is an eagle owl who piercingly craves to find “a star that never goes out… an eternal shining star”. In the plains where he lives, the night stars disappear when the sun comes out, and the owl believes in the deepest recesses of his soul that there is a star calling him; a star that shines brightly and forever, in a distant land.
And this dream is his well-guarded secret for he knows no one will understand or believe him. “He felt the weight of the storks’ stares as they digested what he’d just said. That was the very reason he had never wanted to tell anyone his secret, not until now. He was perfectly aware that they’d take him for a fool.”
And so he begins his search. He flies over the massive plains, depriving himself of water and sleep, arguing with the horses who mock his desire for what isn’t possible and taking help from the storks who cross the plains every year. He almost finds his star several times—a forest fire, a firefly, a glowworm and a diamond—only to realize he got excited too soon. All that glitters is not gold?
While the common struggle of fantasy versus reality is not new, Mari succeeds in telling this prophetic take skillfully and sensitively. The dreams, the disappointments, the constant shocks of failure and the few dances of success—all these emotions flood your heart as you watch the eagle owl deal with conflicting emotions of trust and mistrust; excitement and defeat; conquest and surrender. “Beautiful and sad, like everything else that keeps hearts beating, here on earth.”
It’s not so much this duality that the eagle owl is trying to escape, but the singularity of his loneliness. The imprisonment of his starless day is more unbearable than Lord Falcon’s clay prison. But it is only through this physical entanglement that he is able to spiritually disentangle himself.
For like with most of us, what the eagle owl is searching for comes to him in a form he’s never imagined, minutes after he’s faced his worst fall and hardest trauma.
Besides the ‘oh my God this is the story of my life’ spellbinding narrative, I was really intrigued by the world of birds—the buzzards, plovers, mallard ducks, starlings, goldfinches, lapwings and swallows. Humans have become so egoistic that it’s easy to forget that we share the planet with other forms of life that have equal rights and live with equal intensity. The unstoppable flow of life from fear and friendship between all forms of nature is only possible when each one of us stops being “drunk with arrogance”. Then we can enjoy unlikely partnerships like the eagle owl does with the glowworm.
The story also raises some interesting questions: What is the eternal quest? Is it a sense of belonging or a struggle for personal growth? The lies others tell you, or the lies you tell yourself, which mark the worst betrayal of all? The answer to these questions are in The Shine.
The ‘shine’ within us, which is always the last thing we see, yet it’s the first and only thing we know for sure.
About the Author
Mari is a French national who has settled in India since 1990. His earlier books, plays, poetry, short stories, novels and film scripts, are extremely popular with the French community in Auroville and Pondicherry and have also sold in Canada, France and Ukraine.
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