The Yellow Birds

“We hardly noticed a change when September came. But I know now that everything that will ever matter in my life began then.”

The military establishment has little care for the kind of men it puts through its meat grinder. Some are men of action who learn to do by doing and seek results with little thought for the implications of their deeds; others need to conceive of an activity before they can put it in motion and examine the motivations and the consequences of their actions. This is not a judgment call involving rights and wrongs, just a statement of fact. The present author is obviously one of the latter. The extremis of war has moved sensitive, thinking individuals to write poetry and prose about their war experiences for centuries. The elegiac prose this writer uses is in obscene contrast to the experiences he describes. America may have the largest, mightiest military machine the world has ever seen but its young men are paying a terrible price for that ascendancy.

Every person has to find his/her own means of dealing with Post Dramatic Stress. Some become addicted to the hyper-sensitivity of the environment and re-up finding themselves dead inside and unfeeling without it. Some go into denial and their demons manifest in often violent unpredictable ways. And some find release by writing about it as a means of working through their nightmarish inner tensions as a growing mountain of books will attest. That a war experience should provide the defining moment of a person’s life....?

A yellow bird
witha yellow bill
sat up upon
my windowsill
i lured him in
with a piece of bread
and then i smashed
his yellow head

I believe this version has been cleaned up for public consumption.

The sensation of combat is described as that feeling you get when you know you’re about to be in a car accident but you haven’t hit yet, only it lasts for hours and days at a time. Returning home is quite another matter. Dreaming of lost buddies. Waking and reaching for your weapon that isn’t there. Hyper vigilance, always scoping your surroundings looking for ambush and assessing where to find cover. Startling at every little noise.

The lassitude and depression settles in. How do you define insanity in a world insane? This is not a book for the squeamish and will not leave you feeling better for having read it as the author retires to his isolated cabin in the Blue Ridge at age 34.

The Smoke Jumper

Of interest because I’ve read at least two other books about smoke jumpers and in the wake of the deaths of the  elite squad of 19 in Arizona in 2013. Nicholas Evans is a British writer famous for The Horse Whisperer. Not as husky as the American Nicholas Sparks who churns out similar tomes. It’s a relief to read a romance novel that doesn’t have the picture of a scantily clad male model splattered across its cover and to have to read about how narrow his hips and waist or how broad his shoulders. These typical idealized male images are about as realistic as the proportions of a Barbie Doll. Male authors tend to have a more realistic approach to the male physique and tend on average to spend less time writing detailed descriptions. Not that anyone is going to mistake this for great literature, just a decent mindless summer’s read.

It takes 560 pages for the star-crossed lovers at the centre of this tale to attain sexual congress even though his donated seed had previously fathered her only child. If you possess a similar fortitude then this should be a worthwhile read. The story is about the journey, not the happily ever after and for once it’s a relief not to read page upon page of bedroom gymnastics. Fire-fighting is only a small segment of the entire tale.

The Bridges of Madison County

Never a good idea to read the book after you’ve seen the movie, they’re too different media and script writers alter books to bring the story to the big screen. This is a work of fiction, no photographer named Robert Kincaid ever worked for National Geographic. Why did the author feel the story’s fundamental conceit need be predicated on a falsehood? The bridges and the countryside are very real, I’ve seen them personally. The home used in the movie was deliberately burned as was the bridge where the two met. Movies show, books tell so here we follow Kincaid on his drive from Bellingham, Washington and learn about the man who shows up at an Iowa farmhouse.

The problem with having seen the movie version means it’s almost impossible to think of these characters without picturing Eastwood/Streep. Due to product placement we don’t get to see a Levis label tightly clinging to a male butt on screen. The book contains extras that didn’t make it to screen including the text of Kincaid’s letter to Francesca. As I’ve said it’s hard to think of the characters without picturing the movie version. Interesting that the author gave him his name Robert. This was an eternal love affair that couldn’t be.

Not a great read but one for the romantic in most of us.

The Clearing, Dan Newman

I may sound like a broken record but I wish writers edited their texts or had someone who knows what they’re doing do so. This story jumps from the narrator’s past as a child on the Caribbean Island of St Lucia to his adult self’s recent past in the US to the present in which he has returned to his ghosts on the Island. The story begins with 3 boys looking at the body of a fourth lying by a body of water. It jumps to the death of the narrator’s own son and then has him return to the island to rehash ghosts of the past. The story jumps in nightmare fashion from the past to the present seeming to grudgingly give up its details. The story draws on the influence of rich island families, local voodoo, and superstition. The author keeps the reader in the dark as to the exact details of the murder at the centre of this story until the very end.

Life of Pi

I bought a copy of Yann Martel's Life of Pi when it came out in 2001 and Self 1996 but will confess I got around to reading neither. Suppose I like to support Canadian writers. It took, it seems the production of this movie to garner the author enough attention to gain him a Booker Prize in 2012. Funny, I just finished reading about Lachlan MacQuarry, Viceroy to Australia who earlier served in Pondicherry, India. As the movie says, an Indian from the French part of India living in an Indian section of Montreal, Quebec.

Before I watch this DVD a second time I should read the book. There’s a lot happening here and since only one of the principal characters has the power of speech a great deal of the dialogue is stream of consciousness in Pi’s mind. The overall effect is somewhat overwhelming however the book is excellent reading.

The book begins with two joint themes: the origin of Pi’s name and the philosophy of zoo keeping. Children can be cruel and parents do their children a disservice when they saddle them with odd-sounding names. Pi was named for his Uncle's favourite public pool in Paris a word that phonetically sounds like "Pissing". There are countries that now refuse to register controversial or unusual children's names, but our subject had no such luck. We tend to anthropomorphize animals and romanticize their desire to be free. Animals can be treated cruelly but arguments over whether captivity in a well-run zoo is inhumane continue to this day. Would the animal, given its ability to choose, rather live in the wild or in captivity and is their return to their cages a conditioned response? Certainly most animals live much longer in captivity than they would in the wild due to the care of zoo vets, lack of parasites, and regular proper nutrition.

The book moves on to describe his inquiries into religion. Pi sees no conflict in being actively involved in at least 4 distinct religious observances simultaneously. As his brother says, (Hindu) Temple on Thursday, Mosque on Friday, Synagogue on Saturday, Church on Sunday; three more and you could be on vacation the rest of your life. He requests baptism and a prayer rug. Whereas Hinduism has millions of God’s, the others believe in One God so Pi reasons in going to different holy places he is worshipping the same God. The altercation that occurs when three of his mentors meet Pi and his family in Chapter 24 is hilarious.

As an aside billions of people give no second thought to the fact that they keep a former wolf in their home, the domesticated dog. The dog retains its canine habits adopting its human family as its pack and their home as its territory. We do object to its flagging its indoor territory with scent markers but every dog walker can testify to the fact that they mark it out of doors. I would argue that keeping a large dog in a small city apartment, with little opportunity to run free, is inhumane and many dogs suffer stress because of it. On the other hand the animals in a zoo may become sensitized to the presence of humans in close proximity but remain savage, undomesticated creatures of the wild. Whether a cat is ever truly domesticated is open for debate.

Part 2 jumps over the sinking of Pi’s ship to his life drifting in a lifeboat on the Pacific Ocean. From the Malay Peninsula to Mexico the Pacific is 11,000 miles wide. A drifting lifeboat should make it in just over 2 years, we know that Bligh and his men did make it after the Bounty Mutiny near Figi.

The second half of the book became tedious for me so I put it down for months. Read the last 100 pages in two sittings. Pi’s conversations with the two Japanese investigators make a sick and recovering boy sound acutely intelligent and just a little flippant. One can believe they had trouble buying his story. Interesting interpretation of his second story. And there the book ends.

February

Lisa More’s February follows the life of one of the families who lost husbands, fathers, and sons in the sinking of the Ocean Ranger on February 15, 1982 on Hibernia Oil Fields of the Grand Banks amid winds of 120 mph in nearly 500 ft of water. At the time the largest semi-submersible Oil Drilling Platform afloat it went down due to weather, design deficiencies, and lack of crew training. Rescue drills are boring and companies prefer to train employees on the job rather than send them to class so they can get productive work out of them while they learn. When the loss of an unbreakable window resulted in the flooding of a ballast control room its control panel was shorted and the fact that no one knew how to operate the system manually resulted in a list that caused the vessel’s rapid sinking. With 65-ft waves rescue vessels lacked equipment to pick up survivors in the water or in life rafts. In Mid-February the men rapidly succumbed to hypothermia and drowning. For the record Valentines Day was a Sunday that year. To this day helicopter service to these platforms remains an issue and a recent story reported that rafts designed to hold 60 men defined a man as 160 pounds. What six foot two inch man is that kind of bone rack? So why do men work on these rigs? The pay.

Work on these rigs was and is a young man’s game. Twenty-five-year-olds still feel themselves immortal. They work their shifts, they come ashore, they carouse, they plant their seed, and they return to the rig. Disasters resulting in loss of many lives are nothing new in Newfoundland. On Canada Day, July 1st Flags hang at half mast marking the destruction of the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont Hammel in 1916. Numerous sealing disasters on the ice and ships sunk in the stormy shallow waters of the Grand Banks without a trace have resulted in multiple losses of life. Arrow Air Flight 1285 that claimed the lives of 285 American Soldiers at Gander in December 1985 after a refueling stop-over.

But can you imagine getting your husband’s Valentines Card the day you go to claim his body. Or giving birth to his child after his death. Waiting the indeterminable time without financial support for a settlement from his employer and then dealing with that lump sum payment. The nightmares and juvenile delinquency his fatherless children suffer. Waking daily to the growing awareness that this time he will never return. Dealing with all the quotidian minutia of life without a husband’s support. Getting on with your life despite your grief.

If you missed all the hoopla surrounding the book’s Canada Reads 2013 win it explores the events as they affected a single family at the time; in memory the courtship, marriage, and life together of husband and wife; and the lives of his parents, the wife, and their children in the decades following. Once you start reading this book it is almost impossible to put down. As a non-smoker I had a laugh when a water sprinkler comes on when Lillian tries to sneak a smoke in the washroom on the bus.

Paper Moon

The title is derived from a WW#2 Song that crops up frequently in the story. Similar in theme to the Boy I Loved but not specifically a sequel introducing new characters. Bobby is impossibly handsome and knows it, guys and girls mooning over him, a photographer paying him to play model and fans snapping up his photos. What happens when he is hideously disfigured in a plane crash and can’t bear to look at his own reflection in a mirror or bear the stares of those around him. With the best of intentions we hurt the people we love most. Once more I wish someone had done some closer editing but it’s an okay read.

The Fall of the Year

Howard Frank Mosher’s The Fall of the Year is more a series of vignettes than a conventional novel but it captures a snapshot of tiny Kingdom Common amid the Green Mountains of Northern Vermont near the Quebec Border of Canada. The narrator Frank has come home to spend the summer with his uncle and adopted Father, George the parish priest who coaches the local baseball team, hunts and fishes. Little Quebec and Irishtown in cruder hands would seem caricatures. Filled with the odd characters that inhabit any backwoods community, they are lovingly portrayed as accepted members of society. There’s even room for a riff on Romeo and Juliette. The book even gave me opportunity for a rip roaring belly laugh. I’ve owned this book for 15 years, how is it I’ve waited so long to read it!

Bring Up the Bodies

As the blacksmith's son rises to power he is constantly reminded that though he may presently enjoy the King's favour he is not noble borne and those that are though they may submit to his judgments while that favour lasts, petty jealousies have them sharpening their knives for the day it ceases. Those who fall out of the King's favour do not usually live to write their memoirs and foreshadowings of that end show up in this volume. As book 2 draws to its close wife number 2 heads to The Tower and number 3 comes to prominence.

In this second novel of the series Mantel is more precise in indicating who is talking. Court as depicted feels like a snake-pit of conflicting interests, petty jealousies, and gossip. One is left to wonder, is this any way to run a country? Given the constant crowd of hangers-on surrounding Henry the lack of privacy and a desire to get away from it all would drive an ordinary mortal to distraction. Does a courtier literally wipe his ass? Through it all Cromwell is a constant of efficiency and order. However Harry may have valued his abilities lesser men envied his position and felt slighted that a man of such low birth enjoyed such power.

The King is depicted as willful, self-indulgent, prideful, and moody. One is left with the nagging suspicion that the man who went through 6 wives in search of a male heir may have been impotent. Did his wives commit adultery as a means of conceiving? No spoilers here as the historical facts are not in question. The book comes off as a work of fiction because the detail it provides is conjecture, Samuel Pepys was not around to record the minutia of these people's lives. There are times this reads like a Russian Novel characters referred to severally by their given names, their noble titles, their nick names, their offices, their church positions, their landed seats.

The final hundred pages read like an inquisition and as the author has Cromwell relate to a minion the process is not about finding truth, justice, or guilt; but finding appropriate guilty parties and settling old scores.