The
Birds of Dog: An Historical Novel Based on Mostly True Events. By Ann B. Parson. Luminaire Press. $20.
A work of historical fiction with extensive reference footnotes is, if
not unique, certainly highly unusual. Ann B. Parson structures The Birds of Dog that way to establish
the bona fides on which she bases the
novel, in an attempt to show that its fictional meet-and-greet elements and its
anachronistic modern sensibilities do fit, more or less, into the time period in
which it is set.
It is a curious and intermittently fascinating book that tries a bit too
hard to establish itself as in some sense significant, beginning with its
hard-to-fathom title, which turns out to refer to birds on the small South
Pacific locale of Dog Island. The book is in large part cast as an epistolary
novel, a wonderful form (Dracula, The
Screwtape Letters, Up the Down Staircase, Carrie, The Color Purple and so
many others) now suffering a long slow death in an age where instantaneous
communication is so pervasive that the underlying premise of time, distance and
the exigencies of delivery being interrelated and germane to a plot borders on
the absurd. Structurally, Parson builds her book around the founding in 1830 of
the Boston Society of Natural History, interweaving that event with the
real-world voyage to the South Seas of naturalist Charles Pickering and
Pickering’s ongoing communication with his voluble, modern-sounding and
fictional cousin, Catharine – who, in a mild version of the sort of romance
that so often appears in historical fiction, becomes involved with James
Ambrose Cutting, in real life the inventor of an early form of photography and
the co-founder of the first public aquarium in Boston. Cutting eventually died
in an insane asylum, and Parson has Catharine note that in passing, but her
main interest is in Cutting’s involvement with scientific display of wildlife –
in contrast to the approach of P.T. Barnum, another historical character who
appears in The Birds of Dog and who,
in fact, eventually purchased the Boston Aquarial Gardens and thus may have
precipitated Cutting’s mental collapse.
Clearly there was much ado about something, or a series of somethings,
when it came to scientific research on and display of the natural world in the
United States of the 19th century. Thus, there was clearly a wealth
of information on which Parson, whose focus before this book was on writing
nonfiction, could draw. And indeed her research into the novel’s background
shines through in ways that the story itself does not. Her inclusion in the
book of people including John James Audubon, Charles Dickens, Henry Thoreau, and
Junius Brutus Booth (father of tragedian Edwin Booth and presidential assassin
John Wilkes Booth) goes beyond name-dropping (although there is certainly some
of that) into the exploration of things that the characters – well-known and
little-known, real and fictional – find or could have found important.
There are, however, some difficulties with The Birds of Dog, partly in presentation and more significantly in a
major thematic element. The presentation material involves Parson’s propensity
for placing comparatively modern thinking and speaking in the brains and mouths
of historical figures – a common failing of historical novels, to be sure, but
a disappointing one in such a well-researched work. For example, during a
discussion of Europeans arriving in the New World and observing moose, Parson
has one character make an observation and then back it up with a quote from a
Native American: “[T]heir weapons cancelled out any chance of loving the
animals they shared the forest with. As Chief Metacom observed, You can’t keep love and a gun in the same
pouch.” Historically, Metacom was
sachem of the Wampanoag in the 17th century, but he never said the
words that Parson has attributed to him (she does footnote that fact) and he
was scarcely an objective or benign figure where Europeans were concerned: he
started an anti-settler war and was killed by a Native American on the other
side of the conflict, and his head was mounted on a pike at the entrance to
Plymouth, Massachusetts.
History of that sort is not Parson’s concern in The Birds of Dog, however. More to the point, a major narrative theme in the book is one that at best twists history into a more-modern, more-appealing-to-certain-audiences guise. That is Parson’s hatred of guns – a viewpoint that she suggests ran far deeper in the time period of her novel than was really the case. Certainly there were some pacifists opposed to gun use in 19th-century America, but equally certainly this was not the majority opinion. And certainly there were some people who deeply regretted the killing of birds (and other wildlife) for purposes of scientific study – but, again, this attitude was by no means as pervasive and wide-ranging as Parson wishes it had been. To the extent that The Birds of Dog comes across as just another anti-gun screed, albeit one set in the past rather than the present, it becomes just another preaching-to-the-converted presentation – in which the characters happen to wear bustles and sport handlebar mustaches instead of possessing a more-modern appearance. Thankfully, Parson’s novel is not entirely devoted to guns and gun control, but the portions that do have that focus are weaker and more argumentative than the parts that explore character relationships (both real and imagined) and scientific discovery. Although cast as a kind of “advocacy novel,” The Birds of Dog turns out to be most interesting when it is least cause-focused and least novelistic – and most concerned with the fascinating development of scientific research, presentation and display in the earlier days of the United States.
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