Rating: 
Summary: Even fiction should be historically accurate.
Review: As a Newfoundlander and novelist (now living in the US) I was disappointed by Norman's portrayal of Nfld in 1911. The names of the locals are ridiculous...and even a little silly, and far from the names of Newfoundlanders now or then. Where are the good ol' Irish and British Ryans and Pittmans and Steeles?? He shows them drinking much coffee which would have been a rarity. They were tea drinkers! As for his comments on "Canada", well, until 1949, Nfld was a British colony! It did not have Canadian money -- in fact, money period was seldom seen. The province was dirt poor! People did not buy milk; they had their own cows and milked them. In fairness to the writing, Norman is good. The man obviously has talent, and this 'could' have been a good book with a little research. The characterization is original, but I find it over the top as they're all eccentrics with names that are too hilarious to be believed. Botho August? Mekeel Dollard? Dalton Gillette? Surely not names I've ever heard in Nfld -- or for that fact, anywhere else. I managed to get through the book, and am sure I may enjoy other books by the author as he is clever. But this one annoyed me with the historical errors, the embellished characterization and failed attempt to reflect Newfoundland and Newfoundlanders with any success. I do notice that out of the 12 or so 'reviews' on the book's back cover and inside flap, only one is from a Canadian critic. Go figure.
Rating: 
Summary: Norman is the master of the "anti-mystery".
Review: Howard Norman writes what I think of as anti-mysteries. It is his trademark to announce the "crime' that forms the basis for his story right up front. So, Norman's novels tend to start with confession and work their way toward explanation (as opposed to a standard mystery, which moves toward a solution.). In The Museum Guard the crime is theft; in his newest, The Haunting of L., it is adultery, then murder. This book begins thusly: 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 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.
This novel is characterized by a dry humor, unlikely but truly engaging characters, and the skill with which Norman fixes them in their community and landscape. As he recounts the story to the reader, Fabian, despite knowing where he is headed, even what he will see when he arrives, remains at the mercy of the stubborn swells of memories that preoccupy him along the way. And that, it seems, is the great mystery at the heart of Norman's anti-mysteries. Not what will or did happen, but what role the narrator actually played in everything and why it all seems to have so little to do with him. Norman's befuddled narrator/protagonists, with their confessional introductions, imply that everything they are describing is, in fact, being made sense of in the retelling, that the reader, therefore, is witnessing their very synthesis into a story. Although critics have celebrated The Bird Artist as a tale of "redemption by art," the novel seems skeptical about the idea. For one thing, meaningful redemption requires guilt, and Fabian feels none (nor is the reader shown any reason that he should, a fact that may bother some). There is a big difference, though, between reckoning and redemption. Fabian's "redemption" for Botho's murder is the fantastical mural of Witless Bay he is paid to paint near the end of the novel, above the pulpit of the church. The offer, from Reverend Sillet, is tendered with a mix of prurience and sanctimonious sadism-he throws in extra money for a depiction of the murder. Indeed, Fabian's show of contrition seems to be mostly for Sillet's benefit, and Margaret rightly mocks his shameless decision to paint himself into the mural, facedown in the mud in the place of Botho. But if the mural does not offer redemption, it does offer something like revelation. For the first time in the novel, Fabian steps back from the enveloping current of events, fixes them in relationships, and imposes his own organizing vision on them. What Fabian's art does offer are these moments of clarity, the knowledge that, in the end, Botho's murder is simply "an equal part of how I think of myself." For, in the end, it seems to me it is not so much redemption Fabian seeks, but understanding. Which is a scenario much more true to the realities of everyday life than is the struggle for redemption in my view.
A complex, challenging and rewarding read.
Rating: 
Summary: Waste-of-Space-Thriller-with-the-trappings-of-Intelligence
Review: I do not advise anyone to read this.
The characters are crude and sordid people:
Mother, son, girlfriend, other b.s., other
inconsequential b.s., this is not the type
of book that smacks of originality,
nor is it something you want to study
in college.
I like Loser characters in Pynchon's V.
But I do not allow that anyone and his or her mother
can create a Benny Profane or a Stencil...
Norman's Fabian is one of those unremarkable
characters it feels like a chore and a pain to read the development of.
(If there was a shortage of toilet paper, I may just
heartily recommend this novel.)
And I don't like the gimmick of knowing the murder
so matter-of-fact on the first page.
And I don't like the forced, symbolic art of the end.
This is simply, in sum, a Bad Steven King/Dean Koontz dressed
in the regalia of pretence and Academy-readymade,
BANKER and money-grubber, hasbeen, Forcefield, literacy.
This stuff should stop oppressing the presses.
Instead, I advise you read Middlemarch. Amen.
Rating: 
Summary: Bemused, but not bewildered
Review: I had to sit for several days after finishing this novel before sitting down to write a review. It went in such a different direction than I anticipated. The plot seems to be given away in the opening sentences but is not. The characters seem doomed, but mostly are not. Poor Helen Twombly, yes; the protagonist's mother, Alaric (the name of a Gothic king!), yes; but generally not the ones you would expect. Surely Fabian's drinking thirty cups of coffee a day should have killed him, but it did not, as Margaret's swilling of whiskey should have done her in, but it did not. The doing in of the lighhouse keeper Botho August was richly deserved and psychologically satisfying (you will pardon me). The strange, edgy narrative keeps the reader just slightly annoyed but more strongly intrigued. The author plays a game with the names he gives his characters. I can envision a dissertation somewhere: "Onomastic Skullduggery in Howard Norman's 'The Bird Artist.'"
Rating:
Summary: Bemused, but not bewildered
Review: I had to sit for several days after finishing this novel before sitting down to write a review. It went in such a different direction than I anticipated. The plot seems to be given away in the opening sentences but is not. The characters seem doomed, but mostly are not. Poor Helen Twombly, yes; the protagonist's mother, Alaric (the name of a Gothic king!), yes; but generally not the ones you would expect. Surely Fabian's drinking thirty cups of coffee a day should have killed him, but it did not, as Margaret's swilling of whiskey should have done her in, but it did not. The doing in of the lighhouse keeper Botho August was richly deserved and psychologically satisfying (you will pardon me). The strange, edgy narrative keeps the reader just slightly annoyed but more strongly intrigued. The author plays a game with the names he gives his characters. I can envision a dissertation somewhere: "Onomastic Skullduggery in Howard Norman's 'The Bird Artist.'"
Rating:
Summary: A Subtle Surprise
Review: I have to confess that part-way through the first chapter of this book I didn't think I would finish. I was uncertain of the author's often stark and understated prose, which is quite unlike anything I have read recently. I found myself gradually easing into the book, however, and finished it (much to my surprise) later that same evening in the bathtub. I had read "The Shipping News" and was disappointed, finding it to be a forced, highly-stylized portrayal of Newfoundland life, and picked up The Bird Artist in the hopes of getting my North Atlantic fix after spending a summer on a light-house island in the Gulf of Maine. I was not disappointed.
The book opens with the admission that the narrator, Fabian Vas, is both a bird artist of no great renown and the murderer of the lighthouse-keeper, Botho August. Rather than a trite literary gimmick, these assertions are in fact the lenses through which the main character sees himself, and also form the catalysts which comprise his fall from grace and akward redemption. He is, simultaneously, absolutely ordinary and uniquely intriguing as an individual, and the author (Norman) captures this with natural grace and ease in Fabians narration. The supporting characters of the novel read like familiar archetypes somehow miscast from their typical roles, from the Annie Oakley-esque lover Margaret to Fabian's royal and tragic mother, Alaric. They are made all the more interesting in the ways in which they say and do things that are both unexpected and perfectly natural. In this way Norman artfully captures the ways in which truth can be stranger than fiction, making for a much more fanciful and yet believable fiction than The Shipping News.
The Bird Artist is a comfortable, pleasing read, with a satisfying ending and enough of a plot twist to propel the reader through the second half of the book with renewed relish. While it may seem as though the author has given away the plot with the initial paragraph, this is certainly not the case. Norman skillfully balances tragedy and redemption to deliver a solid novel with just enough Newfoundland flair to satisfy but not detract from the robust characters, natural dialogue, and subtle imagery.
Rating:
Summary: a marvelous book
Review: If you want a book to take with you to the beach that you won't be embarassed to have been caught reading, look no further. I may be biased as I read it under what may be perfect circumstances -on a foggy island on the coast of Maine, with the foghorn and the marine radio for background, but even for the shore-bound among you believe me that this is what The Shipping News never could deliver. Beautifully written with nary a wasted word this book captures both the period and The Rock in a way that I have yet to find in any other author. While the narrator may infuriate you at times you will also find yourself rooting for him throughout, and although we "know what will happen" from the first paragraph on the WHY & the HOW keeps you going to the end.
Rating: 
Summary: Quirky, Lean Prose
Review: It is difficult to categorize the writing of Howard Norman, whose lean, understated prose will either appeal to you immediately or scare you away in the first few chapters. His narrative style is as stark and cold as the Newfoundland landscape it portrays, and yet I enjoyed this novel, as well as his later book The Museum Guard. The book chronicles the story of Fabian Vas, who confesses to murder in the very first paragraph of the novel and who then takes the reader on a very isolated and introspective ride, complete with adultery, murder, and pre-arranged marriage. The North Atlantic seacoast comes alive in Norman's talented hands, as he really demonstrates a knowledge and affinity for the place. He describes people and places with a very keen, insightful but understated style, leaving just enough to the reader's imagination. While I was occasionally looking for a little more from Fabian as narrator, I have to say that years after reading this novel several of its passages remain ingrained in my memory. Pick it up in a bookstore, browse the first few pages, and see if Norman's hypnotic style grabs your attention as it did mine. Then of course buy it online through Amazon and save the discount and tax!
Rating:
Summary: Passionate and peculiar
Review: Norman's painterly, atmospheric novel is set in Witless Bay, Nowfoundland, in 1911, the year that Fabian Vas, bird artist, became the murderer of Botho August, the lighthouse keeper.
Fabian, the narrator, comes at his story in a liesurely manner, sketching his characters - the villagers - and filling them in with the vivid colors of their eccentricities, histories and obsessions. Witless Bay is a stark, isolated place with a desolate beauty; its people are taciturn and sharp-edged but surprisingly tolerant.
Fabian is twenty, sleeping with his childhood friend Margaret Handle, completing a correspondence course in bird art and determined to leave Witless Bay. His parents, Orkney and Alaric, plot to marry their son to a distant relative from Halifax. It's their way of ensuring his escape from their own claustrophopic and threadbare existence.
Despite his love for troubled, independent Margaret, an alchoholic four years older than he, Fabian agrees to his parents' plan. But when his father goes off to finance the wedding with a long bird hunting expedition, his mother plunges into a flagrant affair with the lighthouse keeper.
Helpless, Fabian flounders in angry despair like a rudderless boat in the rocky bay. He turns inward, devoting endless hours to the study and painting of birds. Enigmatic Margaret gives him her pistol, a peculiar act from a girl who is no stranger to the responsibility of death, having knocked an old man over a cliff in a bicycle accident. But Margaret is passionate, mercurial and frustrated, unable to articulate her own pain over Fabian's impending marriage.
The story's tension is heightened by quirky flashes of comedy and interludes of calm when it seems everyone might return to their senses. Instead, Fabian's father comes home and confronts Alaric. "Such a violent argument can turn a house inside out, let alone a mind, and there seemed to be no way to intervene, and no way to slow my heart down."
Imbibing some of their anguish Fabian retrieves Margaret's gun "and from that moment forward the revolver was part of my fate." The murder itself is almost anticlimactic, so inevitable is it.
With flight, a mock of a marriage and the family's arrest, an antic hilarity builds, yoked heavily to fate. Fabian is returned to Witless Bay, to Margaret, to the village's sense of justice, informed by long knowledge, harsh weather, and native reserve.
Norman's prose is spare and elegant, as if shaped by the landscape he evokes so beautifully. His novel transcends its simplicity of form, opening into the mysteries of the human heart.
Rating:
Summary: A GREAT YARN WITH MEMORABLE CHARACTERS
Review: The events depicted in Howard Norman's novel THE BIRD ARTIST are cemented by his finely-honed style into their time and place -- and at the same time they are as universal as they could be. It's one of those stories that could have easily been written as a mystery -- if the murderer had not confessed to the crime in the first paragraph. Fabian Vas is a bird artist -- a talent that would seem to have been born in him. He lives in Witless Bay, Newfoundland, born just at the end of the 19th century. The village is not a wealthy one, and the people are simple and straightforward -- but not stupid. Several of them, in fact, I would classify as being inordinately wise -- their comments about the events that transpire, as well as about life in general reveal this about them. There is a lot of gentle humor to be found here, as well as suspense -- for, even knowing the perpetrator and the victim, it's entertaining to see how things play out. Although Fabian reveals the fact that he has murdered a man at the outset of the book, the author's storytelling skills would not allow my interest to fade. Looking back to the time before the murder, and chronicling the events that followed it, Norman weaves a rich tapestry of these characters lives for the reader -- in the hands of a sensitive director, this would make a memorable film.
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