Customer Reviews

The Impossible Bird

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you don't have a brother, you'll wish you did by the time you are done reading The Impossible Bird -- a profound meditation on familial love wrapped in an intriguing Science Fiction plot. O'Leary's imagination and writing have never been more vibrant. Door Number 3 and The Gift are both great books, but this one blows them both away. I can't imagine there will be too many better novels published in 2002. Definitely worth checking out!

Patrick O'Leary's THE IMPOSSIBLE BIRD rings all the great bells--betrayal, death, forgiveness, and absolution. Lyrical intensity intertwines the polar opposites of Kafkaesque absurdity with the roots of religious thought; the result is Truth, which strikes deep.

The above is a quote of mine, which will appear on the paperback edition. I wanted to add it to this forum.

THE IMPOSSIBLE BIRD is a wonderful book. I can't praise it enough. O'Leary's work is always strange, always original. I think that this is his best novel yet.

I always brag that I know the end of a book within the first 20 pages -- because there is little that hasn't already been used as a plot device. I must say, I certainly did not see this one coming! I found this story very original and well written. Two brothers, close in childhood but distant as adults, suddenly find that teams of people are demanding information about their whereabouts, threatening death, kidnapping, etc. And those people don't seem to stay dead when killed. Also, we are given hints that something quit strange happened in South America to one of the brothers -- something involving a tribal chief, and maybe a hummingbird. OK, that is all I'll tell. Everything else, you have to get from the book. Read it! It's pretty good!

Intricate plot. A web of imagery that is so reminiscent of James Joyce. It also has a Freudian feel. I think read that in a review somewhere, but it is totally true. I think this novel shouldn't be classified as science fiction, but a real modern classic. But who am I, right?
Characters cope with death and life through incredible means. The aliens were very important because of who they were and who they chose to speak to. His representation of how a child's mind works, how the characters deal with repressed memories, was so real. His represntation of the pure male emotional experience is very revealing. Incredible. Wow! I am just totally blown away by his attention to detail and his emotional dream-like imagery. On some level, very disturbing and certain plot turns really caught me off-guard, but in the scheme of the book it all makes some kind of crazy sense. Three nights in a row I stayed up from 10pm-2am to finish this book. When I read Door Number Three I was on vacation and my husband threatened to throw the book away, because I could not put it down. His books are the type you can read again and again and still think about them for days afterwards. I hope he continues to write more.

I bought The Impossible Bird based on my past experience with Patrick O'Leary, including his wonderful debut novel, Door Number Three, which I commented on here, and The Gift. O'Leary seemed to be some kind of cross between the wild ideas of Philip K. Dick with the literary sensibilities of Gene Wolfe, and in those two books the combination worked very well. And that's why the first 70 pages or so of the The Impossible Bird were such a surprise, and unfortunately, not a pleasant one, for it seemed to be all random violence in endless plot sequence without any textual beauty. I put the book down for weeks and only returned to it today because I had nominated for our monthly book club and the meeting was tonight.

Having now finished it, I still don't think it rises to the level of his previous books but I'm not as disappointed with it as I thought I'd be. I found the theme, that life is not worth living if there's no death to measure it by, to be interesting, if not necessarily something I would agree with, and there was some explanation for the rough violence of the beginning. But mainly I'm left with a sense that the novel suffers from the all too easy comparison to the movie, The Matrix, and while these themes and ideas were around long before that movie, it now looms large in the public consciousness.

The basic story, and I'm trying not to give anything away here, is of two very close brothers with a mysterious connection that goes beyond their familial relation and what happens after their deaths. This life-after-death plot is a lot like Jonathan Carroll's similarly flawed novel, White Apples, in that by removing the reader from the "known" world of reality, a loss of structure becomes very hard for the reader to grasp. It's as if there were no rules left for the writer to have to follow, nor for the reader to assume, and the result is a hazy world of dreams that quickly breaks down into a series of talking heads. O'Leary tries to spice this up with some "bullet-time" action (even going so far in one scene as to actually slow down the bullet so that a character can reach out and touch it), but without the framing world, it quickly becomes full of action and fury that ultimately means little to the overall story (in fact, the little logic of the world starts really breaking down when you start to question "why does it take these three things to escape the matrix, and why not others...").

The ending (and spoilers may be here) tries to resolve this, by working around to a reconciliation of the charaters to the main theme, but the gung-ho plot antics made me care much less for the characters when we got to that end. Like them, I was pretty much just ready for it to be over, which may have been what they were looking for, but isn't necessarily the emotion you wish to evoke from your readers.

A paradise free from conflict, suffering, and death-that's what we all want, isn't it? Well, isn't it? This is a question central to O'Leary's thoughtful and accomplished new novel, which pulls off the seemingly impossible feat of merging an sf thriller with an insightful meditation on the meaning of suffering and the nature of love. The plot moves through some very strange imaginative territory, but O'Leary focuses on aspects of our humanity that are all too familiar: longing, jealousy, grief, joy. An exceptional novel.

College literature professor Daniel Glynn still grieves the loss of his spouse Julie. He also feels guilty that he is unable to offer solace to his son Sean, suffering from painful nightmares. At the same time in Los Angeles, Daniel's brother Michael, a TV ad director, struggles with the recent death of a loved one. Neither sibling can turn to the other for relief, as they detest one another.

As the two siblings separately cope with death, strange beings assault both of them in different but related incidents involving demands to hand over the "codes" or reveal the whereabouts of one another. These "crossovers" force Michael and Daniel to seek each other out or else die. As they close in on one other, each brother questions what the future will hold, but both predict with absolute certainty that death is inevitable and this may be their time.

THE IMPOSSIBLE BIRD is an exciting science fiction thriller that provides a series of unbelievable subplots tied together by the Glynn brothers. The story line seemingly touches on every corner of the absurd and then some including hummingbirds as a key element to the wild plot. However, that hitting so much on full cylinders causes the reader to lose empathy with the lead couple as the wild plot overwhelms the audience with a what next attitude. Fans of a weird well written, but all over the place journey past a certain sign post will enjoy Patrick O'Leary's strange adventure.

Harriet Klausner

This writer is a treasure. What a book! I stumbled upon it, purely by accident.
This work is not a frolic in an easy alternate reality, but disturbing and thoughtful and very original. It was hard to read before sleeping and affected my predream thoughts. Even my brain waves felt altered by the existential repatterning in this science fiction.
I never, never knew what would come next. I couldn't outguess him.
And, to my utter astonishment, he made me weep, scooped up the jewels of what is most precious in our lives and spoon fed them to us in his last poetic pages. I could feel my own heart beating in his hand.
A beautiful and profound story. Thank you and I bow deeply to Mr. Patrick O'Leary.
This is possibly the most profound author of poetic science fiction I have discovered in a long time and a rare compliment to my library. A book I will reread and pass thoughtfully into the hands of thinkers.

This book is good, save for one page toward the end. I won't comment much on it but I thought it was a little over played and could have been completely left out and the book would have been great. If not for that one page. Thats why i gave it three stars and i was tempted to give it two. I know that sounds weird but really its just one page that ruined the book for me. Overall the book was pretty good, it doesn't really slow down, something is always happening.

O'Leary is a very thoughtful, inventive writer and I've enjoyed several of his books, but in this case the editor should really have kept a sharper eye for plot inconsistencies. In the chapter "The First Letter" (starts on p.92 of the hardcover edition), we learn of the character Michael's past affair with another man's wife--an affair which ended eight months before the birth of the married couple's son. But in the chapter "Please" (starts on p.189), Michael recalls "the first time he'd felt attracted to her"--which happens to be when her husband was tucking their son into bed! Such a plot glitch should never have been allowed to happen, especially when what we eventually learn about the characters' relationships with each other depends on the timetable of events. Shape up, editors. We still need your keen eye.