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The Great Petrowski: An Illustrated Fable

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Petrowski Pulses with Song

In the very first paragraph of Gina Berriault's fable, "The Great Petrowski," we are told that her Amazonian parrot hero, Petrowski, "probably had not yet found what he was looking for." The book's 80 pages visit particular forms of questing and guidance, beautifully presented with the author's often bemused and always gracious wonderment. What author James Hillman has termed "In Search of Character and Calling," seems to me to be the subject of "The Great Petrowski." Petrowski follows his destiny in much the same way that Gina Berriault assuredly followed her destiny everywhere in her writing of this fable. Her writing itself could here serve as guidance in the art of writing. Keeping her genre in hand, she loves to play: with alliteration, as in "skyward sounds," itself a high order of sounds, and with childlike rhyme, as "On the backs of twelve yaks." She regularly shows us this parrot's world though this parrot's eyes: We hear him "strutting through rain puddles on the flat roofs," we sense "him settling in for the night." Keep an open eye for these bird images; they abound, as in the Opera Director's "feathery white hair," his "swallow-tail coat." Take pause, as well, to meditate a while upon Ms. Berriault's attendant illustrations. Music, the spirit's voice made audible-is here sung in the operatic tenor voice of Petrowski, a parrot, bird of many voices. The Opera Director, in tune with this bird's capacious attributes, and with an eye always on perfection, says to Petrowski, "Please, I beg of you. Sing only the tenor and nobody else." Music enheartens this entire book. You'll hear music in its language, music in its meaning. Running parallel with music is the essential reminder that we live "in times of great crises." Quite soon after Petrowski rediscovered his homeland, our now increasingly dispirited Brazilian rainforest, "A child began to cry." That cry deep within us all. The Profit Motive, as is its inclination, has come doggedly to wound our world. Will our planet even survive? Our very act of breathing is at stake. When Petrowski, in quest of spiritual guidance, climbs into the Himalayas where the air, though thin, remains pure, the Opera Director pauses to reflect: "I wonder. . .if air sounds like bells in all the little chambers of our lungs." Ultimately, Petrowski prophesies a day when "The Destroyers won't dare to blast or drill or saw or dig anymore." Gina Berriault has bestowed on us a fable, a parable of hope. How could her book be otherwise, threaded so intricately through as it is with her humor and insight and wisdom and wonder? However oft she herself might at intervals have doubted it, she brims with hope-Petrowski is her offering: "And how beautiful he was, this bird whose whole body was pulsing with song." On the book's very last page we read, "A curtain of clouds was lifting and the whole sky was a stage," this stage upon which the universal spirit comes to perform for us each and all. Those who knew Gina knew her spirit. Those who did not know her may come to know her spirit through reading this, the last book she was to write. This book pulses with song.

This story is subtitled "A Fable for All Ages". The idealistic message of this beautifully-crafted tale is one that both children and adults will find enchanting. Petrowski, an orphaned parrot who lives somewhere in North America, discovers his natural talent for opera the night of the season's opening. Adored, feted, revered, known as the most talented voice of his generation, Petrowski nonetheless feels compelled to seek the place of his birth, where Petrowski remembers "...trees as high as city buildings, their tops an endless canopy, monkeys with golden manes, and cats much larger than any city cats, and pounding rains, and curling leaves that caught the rain for the birds and insects who never came down to the ground." Shunning fame and fortune, Petrowski flies off into the rain forest, where he trains an entire corps of parrots as singers. They venture out of their habitat to spread the message, through song, that the rainforest must be preserved else the very air we breath may be destroyed along with the vegetation of the great Amazonian basin. The suspense about how they find a key to preserving the rainforest, and whether they succeed, make this a truly exemplary tale.

The story shows clearly, at both the metaphoric and plot levels, that individuals make a difference, that fame and fortune aren't measures of success, and that art is as necessary to us as the air we breathe.

On the back of the book is a rave from Leonard Gardmer, author of FAT CITY, saying that "Petrowski is the greatest parrot hero in all of literatire. His wondrous tale is told with such beauty and empathy that at its conclusion I sprang to my feet shouting Bravo!" That's all well and good but then as it turns out Gardner was her boyfriend or so I understand. I can understand him reaching out in his grief to try to write something about her, but is a blurb really the right format? She has so many fans you'd think the publishers would be able to find someone who didn't know her personally. And yet she has a huge fanbase partially because she was so personable and lovely. I met her twice, and each time I took away a memory of a woman who could see deeply into the souls of others, and one with a Doris-Day-like feeling for animals as well. Something of this gets into this charming fable about the North Americans banding together to try to save the rain forests, and they meet with the Dalai Lama, dwawn cutely by Berriault in her best "If I can draw, you can draw" mode. What happened to the proofreaders of Counterpoint? An ugly little slip on page 66 destroys the beauty of what the Dalai Lama has to say. (Usually Counterpoint could be counted on to produce a flawless book, oh well, even Homer nods.) Amy Evans McClure's cover design is a model of what can be done in a small, limited way, as though she had read the fable carefully and decided to "think locally, act globally."

I don't know about the post-colonial aspects of THE GREAT PETROWSKI. It was written primarily to amuse I suspect. Among my friends who drop by to look at my books of fables, there are several who always ask if this book was the basis for the notorious Coen Brothers movie, THE BIG LEBOWSKI and reluctantly I have to tell them that, no, THE BIG LEBOWSKI came first (1998) and this book merely mirrors the sounds and sense of that title, has no other relation to it.