Customer Reviews

The Bird Artist: A Novel

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Howard Norman's second novel, "The Bird Artist", is a turn-of-century tale of murder, betrayal and redemption set in a fishing town in freezing Newfoundland. It opens with a highly intriguing first paragraph which sadly only partially delivers what it promises to do. The display of Norman's naturalist tendencies and fascination with birds is subtle and well judged in as far as they helped define the character of Fabian Vas. Having said that, I feel he got a little carried away with scene setting which caused the story to drag on a bit in the first half. The novel only started to take off with the murder, but from there, the writing is so uniformly excellent you readily overlook the deficiencies that went before. Norman writes with a restraint and economy that is unusual in thrillers. The dialogue of his characters is similarly spare and understated but with a bitterness and unpleasantness which underlie their true feelings. I found this to be especially true of Margaret and Alaric. By the end of the novel, you wonder whether Fabian's weakness is any less forgiveable than the whiskey swigging Margaret's upfront ruthlessness. Probably not. The novel has all the human interest elements to make a great story and it succeeds for much of the time. The highlight for me was Fabian's redemption via the painting of the church mural depicting coastal life and the dramatic events which altered the course of their lives. "The Bird Artist" is a very accomplished piece of work. It is deserving of its National Book Award prize nomination and a highly recommended read.

If you want a book to take with you to the beach that you won't be embarassed to have been caught reading, look no further. I may be biased as I read it under what may be perfect circumstances -on a foggy island on the coast of Maine, with the foghorn and the marine radio for background, but even for the shore-bound among you believe me that this is what The Shipping News never could deliver. Beautifully written with nary a wasted word this book captures both the period and The Rock in a way that I have yet to find in any other author. While the narrator may infuriate you at times you will also find yourself rooting for him throughout, and although we "know what will happen" from the first paragraph on the WHY & the HOW keeps you going to the end.

Another novel set in the frigid fringes of continental America (standby for the backlash trend in bestsellers from the deep south!) The climate is an apt metaphor for the cool emotional tone of the protagonist, Fabian Vas.

The plot unfolds like an idiot plodding. As much colour is invested in the description of place as it is in the lurid circumstances of the story - not a great deal.

And yet I reckon it works. The lonely boy who has a feel for the fine detail of feathers on a wing, but cannot see love when it stands before his eyes, was convincing to me. The story is his confession. There's no sentimentality. The language is restrained. It fits the buttoned down nature of Witless Bay where formal courtesies struggle to cope with the untidy passions that lie at the heart of the tale.

Relentless, remorseless, restrained...the book makes no appeal to our emotions, but stirs them just the same. Highly recommended for a weekend when the fire is glowing and the weather closing in.

Howard Norman writes what I think of as anti-mysteries. It is his trademark to announce the "crime' that forms the basis for his story right up front. So, Norman's novels tend to start with confession and work their way toward explanation (as opposed to a standard mystery, which moves toward a solution.). In The Museum Guard the crime is theft; in his newest, The Haunting of L., it is adultery, then murder. This book begins thusly:

My name is Fabian Vas. I live in Witless Bay, Newfoundland. You would not have heard of me. Obscurity is not necessarily failure, though; I am a bird artist, and have more or less made a living at it. Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think of myself.
This novel is characterized by a dry humor, unlikely but truly engaging characters, and the skill with which Norman fixes them in their community and landscape.

As he recounts the story to the reader, Fabian, despite knowing where he is headed, even what he will see when he arrives, remains at the mercy of the stubborn swells of memories that preoccupy him along the way. And that, it seems, is the great mystery at the heart of Norman's anti-mysteries. Not what will or did happen, but what role the narrator actually played in everything and why it all seems to have so little to do with him. Norman's befuddled narrator/protagonists, with their confessional introductions, imply that everything they are describing is, in fact, being made sense of in the retelling, that the reader, therefore, is witnessing their very synthesis into a story.

Although critics have celebrated The Bird Artist as a tale of "redemption by art," the novel seems skeptical about the idea. For one thing, meaningful redemption requires guilt, and Fabian feels none (nor is the reader shown any reason that he should, a fact that may bother some).

There is a big difference, though, between reckoning and redemption. Fabian's "redemption" for Botho's murder is the fantastical mural of Witless Bay he is paid to paint near the end of the novel, above the pulpit of the church. The offer, from Reverend Sillet, is tendered with a mix of prurience and sanctimonious sadism-he throws in extra money for a depiction of the murder. Indeed, Fabian's show of contrition seems to be mostly for Sillet's benefit, and Margaret rightly mocks his shameless decision to paint himself into the mural, facedown in the mud in the place of Botho. But if the mural does not offer redemption, it does offer something like revelation. For the first time in the novel, Fabian steps back from the enveloping current of events, fixes them in relationships, and imposes his own organizing vision on them. What Fabian's art does offer are these moments of clarity, the knowledge that, in the end, Botho's murder is simply "an equal part of how I think of myself."

For, in the end, it seems to me it is not so much redemption Fabian seeks, but understanding. Which is a scenario much more true to the realities of everyday life than is the struggle for redemption in my view.
A complex, challenging and rewarding read.

The idea behind this book is to take one of literature's most-proven plotlines and give it a dark, minimalist twist. The story tells of the 1911 coming-of-age of Newfoundler Fabian Vas, who makes his living drawing birds and repairing ships. The action follows Fabian's bizarre love affair with his childhood friend and his arranged marriage to a distant cousin, his mother's adultery, and his murder of his mother's lover.

But the story is stranger than its summary. For such a raw tale, for a book that touches on so many deep and barely-controlled passions - love, hatred, revenge - the writing is remarkably quiet. There's no spark among the characters and rarely any heat. The protagonist reacts far more than he acts, and even then it is with more resignation than furor. The plot is controlled by his mother and his lover, two women with only a tenuous grasp on reality, decency, and what it means to be human, and it zigzags without regard to the boundaries of normal people.

The writing and the setting contribute to the feeling of blank surrealism engendered by the storyline. Newfoundland is generally described in books as a place rich in its bleakness and isolation (although one would have to have read other books set there, or have been there, to know this). And the writing itself is harshly minimalist, to the point of seeming simplistic and a bit uncrafted.

Which is perhaps what the author intended. Maybe, if one is patient enough to see through the tired sentences and dry narration, the characters who don't care or give the reader a reason to do so, and the sheer indifference displayed by the writer and his subjects towards the unfolding drama, there is a lesson. Perhaps the book is not about the largest passions of the human experience but about a man - who so many of us have been - who looks at his unfolding career and his longtime lover and feels nothing but emptiness, a vague confusion, and an obligation to fear.

I have to confess that part-way through the first chapter of this book I didn't think I would finish. I was uncertain of the author's often stark and understated prose, which is quite unlike anything I have read recently. I found myself gradually easing into the book, however, and finished it (much to my surprise) later that same evening in the bathtub. I had read "The Shipping News" and was disappointed, finding it to be a forced, highly-stylized portrayal of Newfoundland life, and picked up The Bird Artist in the hopes of getting my North Atlantic fix after spending a summer on a light-house island in the Gulf of Maine. I was not disappointed.

The book opens with the admission that the narrator, Fabian Vas, is both a bird artist of no great renown and the murderer of the lighthouse-keeper, Botho August. Rather than a trite literary gimmick, these assertions are in fact the lenses through which the main character sees himself, and also form the catalysts which comprise his fall from grace and akward redemption. He is, simultaneously, absolutely ordinary and uniquely intriguing as an individual, and the author (Norman) captures this with natural grace and ease in Fabians narration. The supporting characters of the novel read like familiar archetypes somehow miscast from their typical roles, from the Annie Oakley-esque lover Margaret to Fabian's royal and tragic mother, Alaric. They are made all the more interesting in the ways in which they say and do things that are both unexpected and perfectly natural. In this way Norman artfully captures the ways in which truth can be stranger than fiction, making for a much more fanciful and yet believable fiction than The Shipping News.

The Bird Artist is a comfortable, pleasing read, with a satisfying ending and enough of a plot twist to propel the reader through the second half of the book with renewed relish. While it may seem as though the author has given away the plot with the initial paragraph, this is certainly not the case. Norman skillfully balances tragedy and redemption to deliver a solid novel with just enough Newfoundland flair to satisfy but not detract from the robust characters, natural dialogue, and subtle imagery.

This is a very enjoyable novel by a very creative writer with a voice all his own. I note that many on-line reviewers compared this book to Prouxl's Shipping News, but this is an unfair standard of camparison. Both books are set in desolate but dramatic parts of Canada; both books have a way of transporting the reader to an exotic place. The protagonists are both naive young men. But the Shipping News is one of the best recent novels in my memory, by a hugely talented author. The Bird Artist is not quite up to these standards, but it is fine work on its own merits -perfectly quirky and compelling and wise about the damages done by poor parents. Very original work.

The events depicted in Howard Norman's novel THE BIRD ARTIST are cemented by his finely-honed style into their time and place -- and at the same time they are as universal as they could be. It's one of those stories that could have easily been written as a mystery -- if the murderer had not confessed to the crime in the first paragraph.

Fabian Vas is a bird artist -- a talent that would seem to have been born in him. He lives in Witless Bay, Newfoundland, born just at the end of the 19th century. The village is not a wealthy one, and the people are simple and straightforward -- but not stupid. Several of them, in fact, I would classify as being inordinately wise -- their comments about the events that transpire, as well as about life in general reveal this about them. There is a lot of gentle humor to be found here, as well as suspense -- for, even knowing the perpetrator and the victim, it's entertaining to see how things play out.

Although Fabian reveals the fact that he has murdered a man at the outset of the book, the author's storytelling skills would not allow my interest to fade. Looking back to the time before the murder, and chronicling the events that followed it, Norman weaves a rich tapestry of these characters lives for the reader -- in the hands of a sensitive director, this would make a memorable film.

"The Bird Artist" is a dark yet charming tale set in turn of the century Newfoundland. Howard Norman desearved "National Book Review Finalist" recognition for this well-crafted tale. The protagonist, Fabian Vas, is a bird artist and furthermore a murderer. I've ruined nothing--for the heart of the novel lays not in murder nor bird art but rather how a lonely stretch of land can push characters in most disarming ways. Howard's novel is strangely reminiscent of the better known, Newfoundland-set novel "The Shipping News". I liked it more and found it to be if not as humorous, more touching. The plot is wonderfully coilded; there are plenty of subtle twists and suprises..

A book that reveals the major plot point in the first sentence is one of tale-telling, not suspense. Howard Norman's THE BIRD ARTIST contains murder, adultery, flight from the law, love‹even coffee abuse, but the drama is secondary to the poetic rendering of an odd little town in remote Newfoundland. A rare example of the inexhaustibility of the realistic novel, THE BIRD ARTIST is a find for its simplicity, clarity and beauty. Read the book before Redford makes a mediocre film of it