The Bird Artist by Howard Norman

I was convinced that birds were kinds of souls.  Not the souls of people but of previous birds whose mystery and beauty were so necessary on earth that God would not allow them to be anything in their second life but birds again.

One of the highlights of the trip I took last week to Newfoundland was a visit to the puffin colony just beyond town of Elliston on the Bonavista peninsula.  Thousands of puffins sit on a rock, separated from the mainland by a narrow straight, and if you can stand the chill and wind, they'll fly over your head before returning to the rock.  I wouldn't say they're majestic--they have to flap their wings very quickly to stay in the air, and it makes them look endearingly clownish--but there's something fascinating about how they have an existence of their own, separated from the human life of the island by only a hundred feet.

A similar colony--an even larger one--exists just off the shore of Witless Bay, the setting of Howard Norman's novel The Bird Artist.  Fabian Vas, the young son of a Witless Bay fisherman, draws and paints them, along with other familiar Atlantic birds: ducks, gulls, gannets, cormorants.  This is in the early 20th century, before photography was widespread, and so Fabian's drawings show the birds of Newfoundland to a wider world.  But life in Witless Bay itself can be insular and stifling, as Fabian's mother Alaric well knows, and she presses him into an arranged marriage with a cousin in New Brunswick named Clara Holly, even though Fabian has long been entangled with a local girl named Margaret Handle.  Alaric herself struggles with what she calls the "sameness" of Newfoundland life, and when her husband leaves for a long fishing trip, she begins an affair with the aloof lighthouse keeper Botho August, an affair which drives Fabian--and I guess I buried the lede here, since we learn this in the first paragraph of the book--to kill Botho.

The Bird Artist is about the circumstances leading up to, and the consequences of, Fabian's crime.  It's also about the complex relationship we have to the place we call home.  Alaric pushes Fabian to leave Newfoundland because she is afraid that he will fall into the kind of loveless marriage she has, but she fails to see how the arranged marriage is exactly the kind of thing she worries about.  Both women, for Fabian, represent a compromise between safety and risk: Clara is the unknown, but she is his mother's choice, sensibly and practically arranged; Margaret is the familiar, but she's an unstable alcoholic prone to fits and grievances.  Margaret, who is addictive, sardonic, and unpredictable, is the best part of The Bird Artist, and the only character who has a kind of convincing life.  Botho August, the lighthouse keeper, is dimly fascinating, but he's too far removed from the life of Witless Bay, and the narrative, to be really convincing.

Fabian is acquitted of the crime, but becomes notorious and ostracized in Witless Bay.  As a path to restoration, the local priest hires him to paint a mural of the local community, birds and people alike.  It's the first time that we see him paint people, rather than just birds, and it's meant to represent, I think, Fabian's way of truly integrating himself back into Witless Bay, of making a choice between home and the larger world.

The Bird Artist is a novel that seems tailor-made for me, personally: it's got birds and lighthouses and remote Canadian islands.  Even still, I only moderately liked it.  It's clever and often funny, but never quite clever or funny enough to be memorable.  It can be weird, but it can also be weirder.  The central moment of the book--Fabian's murder of Botho--never quite makes character sense, but is so vital to the book that it exists as a matter of necessity.  But if you find yourself on a flight from LaGuardia to St. John's, you could do worse.