And you call yourself a scientist!
It's as though I were living in a fable about fate and the price of hubris, albeit a kind of toothless one since I'm not dead and my relatives aren't all desperately trying and failing to avoid mutilation, execution, or incest.
I thought I was so clever. "Self," I said to myself, "you know how dippy bullshit about the power of love pisses you off. Protagonists who act like dickcheeses with no justification and never get called on it with so much as a narrative nod because they're protagonists, so what they do is good even when it's bad, you know how they piss you off. So buy yourself a couple of extra years of stroke-free living and just don't read Deathly Hallows." And being all clever and stuff, I read different books!
Unfortunately, one of those books was The Conjurer's Bird by Martin Davies.
My notice that things were not going to go smoothly came in the form of a bit of sloppiness on the part of the author; on more than one occasion, he included two words that visibly had the same root in the same sentence (i.e. noticeably and notes.) I don't know if this is officially in the Big Book of Things That Are Wrong, but it makes me twitch, same as internal rhymes in a sentence. Since the first instance of this occurs on page 5, I was in the mood to be critical from the get-go.
From page 5 to page 312 I read, and cringed, and held out increasingly faint hopes that the narrator would realize A.) that the fact that his pride was hurt because he couldn't save the world personally wasn't a good excuse for pulling an Achilles and sulking off to academia to badmouth people who were still trying, B.) that letting a semi-smitten grad student run around doing half or more of the work on the quest, and meanwhile kind-of-sort-of leading her on while blatantly not being over his ex, without any excuse other than convenience and utility, was basically a scuzzy thing to do, and C.) that the fact that his rival was rich and self-confident didn't mean that attempting to thwart said rival and thus prevent the rediscovery of an extinct bird by science and possible even the DNA analysis and cloning of said extinct bird, was anything other than a supremely petulant and deeply wrong act.
On page 312, I encountered the following sentence, while the narrator is talking to semi-smitten grad student about ex: "She couldn't understand that I had feelings more important to me than the whole bloody rain forest."
Now, because I, unlike the narrator, am not a self-centered cock, I realize that there are times when my own personal emotions, no matter how strong, must take a back seat to the well-being of my fellow humans and the world around me. As a result, I did not hurl the book across the subway car when I read this sentence. But I confess it was a struggle. Again, if there had been the slightest hint in the direction of unreliable narration, or if the narrator had merely been recounting his thinking during a selfish phase of his life that he had since outgrown, I would have found that cool, a cruelly accurate portrait of a particularly poisonous type of activist that we've probably all encountered. But the narrator gives lip service to his ex's dedication and his immaturity and then carries on with the same, actively damaging attempts to recover the lost bird and indirectly undermining his ex's ongoing efforts to set up rain forest preserves out of what amounts to personal pique.
The historical subplot, regarding botanist Joseph Banks and his lover, a gifted botanical artist, is less offensive merely by virtue of having no fucking point whatsoever. It gives us a break from the insufferable narrator and allows the reader the luxury of being a couple of plot-points ahead of the modern searchers on any given page, but it's thematically incoherent and the point of view transitions are poorly handled to the point of near head-hopping.
Only the sub-sub-plot, about how the narrator's grandfather spent decades and nearly died searching for the first specimen of the Congo peacock only to be scooped by a researcher who found two specimens in a museum in Belgium, mislabeled as Indian peacocks, is of any real interest whatsoever at the end of the day.
I thought I was so clever. "Self," I said to myself, "you know how dippy bullshit about the power of love pisses you off. Protagonists who act like dickcheeses with no justification and never get called on it with so much as a narrative nod because they're protagonists, so what they do is good even when it's bad, you know how they piss you off. So buy yourself a couple of extra years of stroke-free living and just don't read Deathly Hallows." And being all clever and stuff, I read different books!
Unfortunately, one of those books was The Conjurer's Bird by Martin Davies.
My notice that things were not going to go smoothly came in the form of a bit of sloppiness on the part of the author; on more than one occasion, he included two words that visibly had the same root in the same sentence (i.e. noticeably and notes.) I don't know if this is officially in the Big Book of Things That Are Wrong, but it makes me twitch, same as internal rhymes in a sentence. Since the first instance of this occurs on page 5, I was in the mood to be critical from the get-go.
From page 5 to page 312 I read, and cringed, and held out increasingly faint hopes that the narrator would realize A.) that the fact that his pride was hurt because he couldn't save the world personally wasn't a good excuse for pulling an Achilles and sulking off to academia to badmouth people who were still trying, B.) that letting a semi-smitten grad student run around doing half or more of the work on the quest, and meanwhile kind-of-sort-of leading her on while blatantly not being over his ex, without any excuse other than convenience and utility, was basically a scuzzy thing to do, and C.) that the fact that his rival was rich and self-confident didn't mean that attempting to thwart said rival and thus prevent the rediscovery of an extinct bird by science and possible even the DNA analysis and cloning of said extinct bird, was anything other than a supremely petulant and deeply wrong act.
On page 312, I encountered the following sentence, while the narrator is talking to semi-smitten grad student about ex: "She couldn't understand that I had feelings more important to me than the whole bloody rain forest."
Now, because I, unlike the narrator, am not a self-centered cock, I realize that there are times when my own personal emotions, no matter how strong, must take a back seat to the well-being of my fellow humans and the world around me. As a result, I did not hurl the book across the subway car when I read this sentence. But I confess it was a struggle. Again, if there had been the slightest hint in the direction of unreliable narration, or if the narrator had merely been recounting his thinking during a selfish phase of his life that he had since outgrown, I would have found that cool, a cruelly accurate portrait of a particularly poisonous type of activist that we've probably all encountered. But the narrator gives lip service to his ex's dedication and his immaturity and then carries on with the same, actively damaging attempts to recover the lost bird and indirectly undermining his ex's ongoing efforts to set up rain forest preserves out of what amounts to personal pique.
The historical subplot, regarding botanist Joseph Banks and his lover, a gifted botanical artist, is less offensive merely by virtue of having no fucking point whatsoever. It gives us a break from the insufferable narrator and allows the reader the luxury of being a couple of plot-points ahead of the modern searchers on any given page, but it's thematically incoherent and the point of view transitions are poorly handled to the point of near head-hopping.
Only the sub-sub-plot, about how the narrator's grandfather spent decades and nearly died searching for the first specimen of the Congo peacock only to be scooped by a researcher who found two specimens in a museum in Belgium, mislabeled as Indian peacocks, is of any real interest whatsoever at the end of the day.