The Bird Artist, Howard Norman’s second novel, is the story of a man struggling to come to terms with his own identity. The novel’s narrator, Fabian Vas, strives to integrate two very disparate parts of his sense of self; he announces these conflicting pieces of himself, as well as several other crucial elements of the novel, in the very first paragraph: “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 I 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” (3).
The novel is the story of how Fabian came to kill Witless Bay’s lighthouse keeper. It is also, and perhaps more significantly, the story of how Fabian and the rest of the small town’s residents begin to understand the ways the murder has transformed their lives and relationships. The novel takes place in 1911 in a town so isolated from the rest of the world that the mail comes to town by boat, and only during the summer months. Fabian Vas, employing skills developed through a mail-order art class with a magazine illustrator, leads a satisfying life earning a little money contributing drawings of birds to magazines such as Bird Lore. He had, for years, been spending several nights a week with Margaret Handle, the sexy, assertive, hard-drinking daughter of Witless Bay’s mail-boat captain.
Things begin to change dramatically when Fabian’s parents decide he should marry. They arrange a marriage on his behalf with a woman from a distant town, his fourth cousin Cora Holly. Though Fabian opposes the marriage, his parents will not relent. Fabian’s father, Orkney, has to leave Witless Bay to earn the money necessary for the wedding. Soon after Orkney’s departure, Fabian’s emotionally fragile mother, Alaric, promptly begins an affair with Botho August, the lighthouse keeper. Though Botho is a private man who’d “rather be up in his crow’s nest than down among common men” (28), he is also a romantic figure in Witless Bay. We soon learn he has also been sleeping with Margaret Handle. Fabian tries to negotiate this complex situation, but his hatred for Botho eventually drives him to murder.
The richness of The Bird Artist is a result not of Fabian’s retelling of his story, but instead of the atmosphere Norman creates through an exceptional awareness of compelling and suggestive detail. Norman portrays Witless Bay and its frozen northern terrain and places with peculiar names like Shoe Cove and Dog Tooth Harbor as dreary, cold, ever-present manifestations of the palpable tensions being played out among Fabian, Botho August, Margaret, Alaric, and the other town residents. Norman also populates Witless Bay with a great many quirky, troubled, dark, occasionally funny characters. The web of relationships among the townspeople, and the fact that Witless Bay is the kind of small village where everyone knows everything about everyone else, adds both to the novel’s tension and the undercurrent of inevitability that runs through every expression and gesture of the story’s key characters.
The attempts of Fabian Vas and Witless Bay to reconcile his double identities of artist and killer reveal much about the human struggles for self-awareness, compassion, and empathy. Because Norman borrows something in the novel’s tone and color from magical realism, these struggles unfold in unexpected, even startling ways that seem to be revealed as much by the sea, the cold, and the birds Fabian Vas observes and paints as they are by human word and action.
SOURCES
Jones, Louis B. Review of The Bird Artist, by Howard Norman, New York Times Book Review, 10 July 1994, p. 7.
Norman, Howard. The Bird Artist. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1994.
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