by Howard Norman,
Picador, 1994
289 pages

Fabian Vas, the narrator and protagonist of Howard Norman’s 1994 novel “The Bird Artist,” reveals two key personal details within the book’s opening paragraph. First, he explains that he is, as the title suggests, a bird artist. He makes a modest living drawing the native species of the small fishing community where he resides, sketching ibises, ospreys, sandpipers, kittiwakes, mallards, garganeys and even his least favorite bird, the cormorant.

The second detail has a more confessional tone: “Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think of myself,” Fabian explains in the fifth sentence.  

Few beginnings could be more enticing than this. What could have possibly compelled this seemingly gentle bird artist with whom we’ve so recently become acquainted to murder the lighthouse keeper? With this question tingling in our brains, we read on, and Norman obligingly unfolds the tale.

The story takes place in the early 1900s in Witless Bay, a remote coastal village in Newfoundland. Twenty-year-old Fabian lives in this town with his parents, Alaric and Orkney Vas. He works repairing boats while fine-tuning his painting skills under the tutelage of famed bird artist Isaac Sprague, with whom he exchanges letters.

An emotionally vacant young man, Fabian covets little more in life than to draw birds from sunup to sundown, drinking endless cups of coffee all the while. He sleeps twice a week with his childhood sweetheart Margaret Handle, a beautiful but unstable whiskey-swilling woman with a tortured past.

Fabian’s life—and Witless Bay in general—is characterized by banal routine. He collects his mail at Romeo Gillette’s general store, eats meals of codfish chowder at Spivey’s, and listens to Sunday church sermons from Reverend Sillet. His sole escape from this monotony is the avian world, which he attempts to capture in his paintings, replicating the minutest detail of every bird he observes.

But Fabian’s life develops a kink when he learns that his parents have conspired to arrange his marriage to a distant cousin in Halifax. This looming elopement complicates his relationship with Margaret Handle and with his mother, who never approved of Margaret. Perhaps even worse (although Fabian betrays no emotion), his father takes off on a months-long bird hunting expedition to help pay for the wedding.

It’s during Orkney’s absence that life in Witless Bay becomes more colorful—though the colors are not always pretty. Fabian mostly accepts the unwelcome changes to his daily life with bitter resignation. When he finally intervenes in his own fate, his entire existence takes on a new dimension.

Fabian demonstrates a disarming nonchalance about the heinous crime he commits, as well as other violent events that transpire. His stoic indifference calls to mind a fellow murderer in the literary canon—Meursault from Camus’ “The Stranger.” Yet Fabian does not appear to subscribe entirely to the existential notion that life is absurd. Though he is detached, he entertains a vague sense of destiny that propels him and Margaret forward through dark times. What’s revealed in this work of fiction, among other things, is the power of love over rationality, which inevitably leads to absurd acts. 

Norman exercises few fancy linguistic acrobatics in his second novel. The sentences are mostly short and direct, reflecting Fabian’s mild temperament (the second-person phrase, “You would not have heard of me,” occurs twice in the first chapter). And yet this book is psychologically verdant, a poignant and disquieting commentary on the nature of spousal and filial relationships, of sin and redemption.