BR: The Bird Artist (Howard Norman)

Amazon Link: The Bird Artist

The novel opens with a confession, the protagonist, Fabian Vas, is a bird artist and a murderer. The setting is a small cod fishing village on an island province of Canada, replete with unique characters and scandal, including adultery (of which Fabian’s mother is one of the key players). The time is the early 1900’s.

In a voyage of recollections, Fabian shares his thoughts, dreams, experiences in a matter of fact way. He appears to be resigned to much of what happens, helpless beneath it, as though he has no hold of the rudder of his life. He is dedicated only to his art, the painting of birds and his dream of one day being recognised as a renowned bird artist. Though, as his idol, mentor and tutor by correspondence points out, he may be lucky to make enough money to supplement his income because his talent, though natural, is far from astounding. He takes this ego blow in his stride, consuming cup upon cup of coffee, while he fine-tunes his craft.

When his parents arrange a marriage to a near relative, a girl he has never met and will not meet until their prescribed wedding day, he accepts it with muted dismay. He has a lady friend (lover), Margaret Handle, a young woman with a damaged past, alcohol addiction and a way of telling it just as it is. When she learns of Fabian’s intended marriage, she is angry, hurt, revengeful… Fabian in contrast is listless, taken aback by Margaret’s rage. Though surely he must love her, he gives no indication of it.

In today’s society he may be taken to be a momma’s boy, incapable of making his own decisions, but I think it’s deeper than that. I consider Fabian to be a young man who wishes for a peaceful life so he can paint his birds. He goes with the flow, taking the easier route to avoid confrontation, and I can’t fault him that.

Fabian’s father leaves to hunt birds, the bodies of which will be sold to fund Fabian’s marriage, and his mother, Alaric, immediately finds loving companionship in the arms of the lighthouse keeper. It is an affair that she flaunts, and for the first time Fabian has a firm opinion on what is right and wrong. It is as though his mother’s marital treachery sparks an inner resolve, something formerly lacking and that he needs in order to grow. His anger grows slowly and culminates in murder, the death of a representation of his mother’s betrayal – the final breaking of the apron strings that keeps him weighed down as a boy.

The story plays out with some predictability, given Fabian’s initial confession, but this by no means detracts from its quality. Instead, I was drawn along, fascinated by each nuance that determines the fate of the characters. And, the characters themselves are the real shining stars of this novel. Each is drawn with fine detail, a sparkling clarity that sets them apart as whole, living, breathing people. So fine in fact that I researched the author’s technique and found (unsurprisingly) that he spent extended periods of time in remote communities, just like the one that featured in this novel. The authenticity shows, it really does. It’s a quality to aim toward.

This article is fascinating: http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleid=4377 It gives the Howard Norman’s history, how he came to write ‘The Bird Artist’ and other information about his life and approach to writing. Reading this makes me long to break out of my safe little life, my reliance on procrastination when things get hard, and the false belief that I have a whole life in front of me in which to achieve my goals. I don’t. It’s now or never. It’s time I realised it, not just in my head but in my heart.

Rating: ****1/2 out of five stars.

BR: The Greenhouse (Susan Hillmore)

Amazon Link: The Greenhouse

...moving and poetic...The Greenhouse should be read for the beauty of its descriptions, its original vision, and its complete lack of vulgarity, rare in a contemporary novel.--The Literary Review

Written in omniscient point of view, this novella spans a woman’s life and just beyond, until the thing she most cherished is destroyed.

Vanessa is born into a well to do family, ostracized by her father due to a birth defect that crippled one leg, she hides (and is hidden) from society until, eventually, she is left alone as her family dies or moves away. The greenhouse, a stately, gothic structure, is the focus of her devotion, the reason for her life. She tends the plants within as though they are her children, and would die to protect them. When an intruder comes onto the grounds, stalks her and eventually rapes her, Vanessa secludes herself in the house and the greenhouse aches for the loss.

From the rape, a child is born – a boy with dark eyes and hair like his father, similarities that the greenhouse notices and fears. The child grows, competing for his mother’s attention and often-times failing. Vanessa loves her son, adores him, but parents him badly, giving him free roam, leniency beyond acceptable levels, and turning a blind eye when he misbehaves – she focuses the attention he needs on the greenhouse, and the boy notices. Soon, he is beyond her control and her beloved greenhouse becomes the focus of his rage.

The ending is far from cheery, downright maudlin actually. None of the characters achieve respite from their respective traumas, and the greenhouse, the focus of the novel and the main protagonist, meets a grim end.

But, the story is well written, and as reviewed it is moving and poetic. I read it for that reason alone, and it was worth it.

Rating: *** ½ out of five stars.

BR: A window across the river (Brian Morton)

Amazon Link: A window across the river.

The back cover reads:

Isaac and Nora haven’t seen each other in five years, yet when Nora phones Isaac late one night, he knows who it is before she speaks. The two rediscover their love, and Nora, a writer, is soon on fire with the best work she has ever done. Absorbed by her writing, she doesn’t realise at first that her story is a fictionalize portrait of Isaac, exposing his frailties and compromises, sure to be viewed by him as a betrayal. The conflict tests the limits of their relationship and raises deeply complex questions about how we remain faithful to our calling if it estranges us from the people we love.

Nora has a gift, though it seems more a curse. She is a writer, a gifted one at that, however her creativity is restricted to portraying those she loves. The more she cares about a person, the more able she is to characterize them (often unfavourably) in her stories. To this end she seems more a biographer with a creative whim, than a writer.

It is a writer’s responsibility to give life to their characters, to make them living, breathing, solid people for a reader to interact with, however a writer’s true worth comes from their ability to synthesis their experiences, interactions, observations, into characters whom are new, unique, whole-souled individuals who exist as though they are real, yet they do not exist anywhere else. They may possess similar traits to living people, to loved ones, or acquaintances, but they should not personify them. If they do, then it’s not fiction, it’s something else, journaling maybe, or a form of real life fan-fiction.

I found it difficult to like Nora. She cared for others, had genuine feelings for others, yet could not prevent herself from betraying them through the written word. The novel cover raises the question of whether we can remain faithful to our calling if it estranges us from the people we love. Though, in this novel’s universe, Nora’s writing was well accepted, even rewarded, I found it hard to accept her as a fiction writer.

I felt closer to Isaac, a long term friend of Nora’s who has always imagined that one day they would live happily ever after together. Isaac is a photographer, in his early forties (whereas Nora is 35), skilled but not blessed with some intangible quality that would make his work magnificent. He feels that failure, and observes younger artists who achieve greatness with comparative ease.

Nora and Isaac are flawed, no more than you or I, and no less than. Nothing startling happens in the story, no great drama, no unraveling of dark secrets, no big mysteries, just two people trying to work out their place in the world, and how their creativity (their art) fits into that. Both characters made generalizations about others in their world – younger and older people, those who were alone and those who were not. Nora, especially, viewed her peers in a harsh light, and often-times she cast that on herself.

It’s an entertaining read, well written, engaging and thought provoking. I couldn’t help but wonder about my own place in the world, my commitment to achieving my dreams, my future and what it might hold.

Rating. ****1/2 (out of five).

BR: Bitters End (David Owen)

The back cover reads:

Shattered by the bizarre death of his fiancée, Raoul abandons civilization and drives inland. Forced by a compulsion beyond grief, he is drawn into the harsh country, an unfamiliar, sun-scorched world of vast space and very few people. He settles at Hurrah, a dilapitdated property surrounded by five hundred acres of wasted stubble and nothingness, a dead, parched hell on earth. There he retreats into loneliness, the isolation and hardship of his life cocooning him from the demands of memory and time.

Until one day out of the endless haze of the horizon walks Julia, mysterious, beautiful, escaping from her own secret torment….

Bitters End is a haunting, mesmerizing novel about love and loss.

How could I resist buying this!? The book is all that, and more. Raoul is grief stricken, compassionate, lonely. His wife died in an unimaginable (darkly comical) workplace accident and the media made jokes. To escape the torment, Raoul escaped the city and ended up on Hurrah, a property just as abandoned and desolate as his emotions.

The nearest town, on which he relies for water and supplies, fosters suspicious hostility, and his neighbour, a camel breeder and crazed recluse (the type of man he will become if he stays on Hurrah), is the closest thing he has to a friend… and that’s not very close. The only person he cares about is his younger brother, a comparative success, different in all ways from him and someone whom he cannot bear to disappoint. He worries over how to tell Emerson about Maisie’s death, how to give the impression of healthy grief, of prosperity, of all that an older brother should be. He settles on false optimism, and a letter that he knows will take months to reach its destination.

Then Julia arrives, a vision of beauty, an unlikely event that is almost surreal. She carries a mystery, a story of persecution and something more – an unimaginable horror that no sane man could accept. In her, Raoul finds peace, companionship, purpose… and ultimately insanity. When Emerson comes to the property in response to his brother’s letter, and with problems of his own, he is ill-prepared for what he finds.

This is a novel that demands a second read. The ending is abrupt, incomplete, yet satisfyingly mysterious. What actually happened? What was real, what wasn’t? It’s up to the reader to decide.

The writing is nothing short of stunning – it’s impossible not to feel the heat, the desolation, the compounding grief of this man... his pain is all around, in the words, between them, layered.

The sun had become molten and obese in its descent towards the western ridge. It threw great blood orange patterns across the sky, emphasizing the landscape’s vastness over which brief, elongated shadows crept. The farmhouse and sheds cracked loudly as they cooled. Hordes of tiny insects filled the air, as they did at the end of every day, until the atmosphere took on a vibrating quality. Patterns that were neither shadows nor life forms infected the sudden and stark tranquility of relative coolness. It had always been a strange and uplifting moment for Raoul: the soil and its inhabitants breathing a collective sigh of relief. The patterns were earth scents, dry, dusky, faintly aromatic.

I wish, one day, that I could write so well.

Rating: ***** (out of five)

BR: Fly Away Peter (David Malouf)

Amazon Link: Fly away Peter

“For three very different people brought together by their love for bihrds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilization rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment.

Inevitably, the two young men – sanctuary owner and employee – are drawn to the war, and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.”

Jim, employed by Ashley Crowther to record all the bird species that visit Ashley’s property, is uncomplicated. He takes each day as it comes, content with the small beauty around him, fascinated by the intricacies of life. He knows a lot about birds, and avoids thinking too hard about those things that he doesn’t understand – like his father, a brutal, unloving man who is best avoided. When war reaches Australia, Jim thinks little of it. As time moves on, the conflict an ocean away becomes unavoidable.

Jim joins up. He does so without too much real thought, and Imogen (his photographer friend, an older woman who lives by her own dreams and defies rumour) is dismayed. Ashley similarly is sent overseas, but he joins up as an officer.

The second half of the book illustrates Jim’s experiences in the trenches, with the mud, blood, the unimaginable carnage. The horror drags on for months, and little by little Jim comes apart. His narrative is fixed, focused, like a record snagged on the same groove. If he engages in battle, or kills anyone, it’s not known, though it is expected that he does. He observes and experiences the battle with the same detached devotion that he observed the birds on the beach in Queensland, it’s horrific, a study of the brutal destruction of a man’s soul, and ultimately of his life.

The book is shorter than I imagined it would be, and in some places it seems scant, devoid of detail. The ending leaves a bitter aftertaste and a realization of truth. No book about war can ever leave anything but, yet the novel goes beyond the actions and experience to the truth that the ‘past cannot be held’.

Rating: ***1/2 out of *****

BR: Be Near Me (Andrew O'Hagan)

Amazon Link: Be Near Me

“When an English priest takes over a small Scottish parish, not everyone is ready to accept him. He makes friends with two local youths. Mark and Lisa, and clashes with a world he can barely understand.

Be Near Me is a story of art and politics, love and change, and a book about the way we live now. Trapped in class hatreds, threatened by personal flaws, Father David begins to discover what happened to the ideals of his generation.”

Andrew O’Hagan crafts a real world, a seaside hamlet in the Scottish isles, and inhabits it with a flawed priest, a protagonist who I slowly grew to like, to respect, to understand. David, a fifty-something year old, spends a lot of time reflecting on the past, on his childhood, his mother (a successful romance writer who provided him with financial certainty but very little emotional support) and a present day world that makes little sense to him. He values books and fine wine, his love of the latter not enough to suggest alcoholism but more than that expected of a parish priest. In fact, many of his approaches to faith are out of sync with the expectations of his flock, his peers and mentors.

When the locals fail to accept him, some going so far as to threaten and curse him for being English, a pompous outsider who has no place on Scottish soil, he finds companionship with the only other outsiders in the small community – two young people, Mark and Lisa. The youth are fifteen years old, Lisa young and impetuous, overly emotional and taken to shifting loyalties when she doesn’t get her own way, and Mark, a self-absorbed hoodlum who seeks out David’s company in preference to people his own age. The friendship leads to trouble and revelations that I didn’t see coming, but in hindsight were always there.

“Troubles like mine begin, as they end, in a thousand places, but my year in that Scottish parish would serve to unlock everything. There is no other way of putting the matter. Dalgarnock seems now like the central place in a story I had known all along, as if each year and each quiet hour of my professional life had only been a preparation for the darkness of that town, where hope is like a harebell ringing at night.”

Initially I found the book to be slow, overly descriptive in setting and too full of characters and recollections. I continued to read even though it was a challenge to my concentration. Around a third of the way through, this changed. I went from reading because I had picked it up and the writing really was masterful, the author well respected and I felt it to be educational to keep reading… to enjoying and engaging and glowering each time I reached my station and had to put the book aside.

There were some aspects of the novel that I could not fully appreciate. For instance, David held a dinner party for his peers and over wine they discussed politics, war, America’s role in Iraq and the influences that shape modern Scotland. References were made to politics, religion, philosophy and I could only read as an observer, unable to engage in the narrative, unable to have a well developed opinion or to even understand some of the comparisons that were made. I felt uneducated, almost stupid, yet I realise I should not. Politics, religion and even philosophy interest me in a general sense, but not specifically. I tune out, I guess I’m like Mark in that respect, I absorb only that which is of personal relevance to me.

Overall, this is a book that deserves a second read (maybe even a third).

Rating: ***** out of five.