Birds in Fall
By Brad Kessler, Scribner, 2006

Metaphors, when they work well, are more than a clever literary device. A well-crafted metaphor helps the reader to understand an unfamiliar concept by comparing it to something easier to grasp. That end seems to be what Brad Kessler is trying to reach with Birds in Fall, the writer’s second, intelligently satisfying novel. Kessler approaches the unfathomable human concepts of death, loss, grief, and transformation and tries to make them a bit easier to understand by comparing them to the equally mysterious but comfortingly more physical process of the migratory instinct of birds. It’s a metaphor that, in the wrong hands, could be trite and saccharine, but Kessler handles it with intellectual grace, and his novel is warm without being melodramatic.

As the book opens, ornithologist Russell Gathreaux is flying from New York to Amsterdam, where he plans to give a talk on kingfishers at an international ornithology conference. As Russell’s first-person narrative unfolds, we become aware that something has gone terribly wrong with the airplane in which he’s flying, and with chilling calm, Russell, the taciturn woman in the seat next to him (a cellist returning home to Europe), the airplane, and dozens of other passengers plummet toward the icy Atlantic off the coast of Nova Scotia.

On a small island nearby, an innkeeper sees the plane plunge into the water, a sight that will haunt him, and, as much as he’d like to forget it, the event will change his life, devastate his personal relationships and teach him much about human resilience.

In the wake of the plane crash, family members of the passengers congregate on Trachis Island, the closest point to the impact - some of them in hope that there’s been a mistake, that their loved ones have somehow survived the catastrophe, most of them hoping to find some kind of closure at the spot where their family members died. The Chinese parents of a young woman on the plane, the husband of the Bulgarian cellist, the teenage children of a Dutch couple, the born-again-Buddhist sister of another passenger, the Iranian uncle of yet another - all come together at the normally sleepy inn owned by Kevin Gearns, an expatriate American, and his partner, Douglas. The almost comically diverse group coexists uncomfortably, each of them on the island for a different reason, almost none of them sure why, precisely, they are there. Foremost among the reluctant mourners is Ana Gathreaux, herself an ornithologist, who has left her laboratory behind and come to Trachis Island hoping, perhaps, to find something that will convince her that Russell is actually gone.

Grief is not an uncommon subject in mainstream novels. In fact, characters confronting the loss of a loved one is probably one of the most popular plot drivers in contemporary American fiction. After 9/11, plane crashes especially have been tempting territory for authorial experimentation, but even before that fateful day, the sudden, cataclysmic power of an airborne disaster has been irresistible to writers - see Michael Tolkin’s Among the Dead for a disturbing exploration of the nearly unimaginable horror of losing one’s family in a plane crash.

What sets Kessler’s novel apart is the birds. Through Ana, we learn about the remarkable abilities and habits of migratory birds: how they know somehow, without even needing to see the sky or feel the change of seasons, exactly when to set off on their southward journey in the fall; how they know where to go, even if they’ve never made the trip before; how a sudden storm can threaten them, dooming them to death far out at sea; how the same storm can throw individuals off course, stranding them on a strange continent, sometimes in the company of a foreign species, but where they can, amazingly, learn to live happily.

It is not always easy to discern, at any given moment, to which characters the metaphor of the birds applies. Is it to the mourners, who must learn how to live after their loss, or is it to the passengers themselves, who have set off on a spiritual or metaphorical migration? And where does the thread of Buddhist spirituality fit in? Some parts of those questions are resolved in the end, and others remain ambiguous, but the apt metaphor of the birds holds solid throughout.

Don’t expect tidy conclusions from the novel, nor romance, nor anything closely resembling closure. Expect instead acknowledgment that the workings of the natural world are mysterious and that, try as we might, we can never truly understand why anything happens. We can’t know that everything will be all right; all we can count on for certain is that we will, eventually, end up somewhere that we never thought we’d be, and that, somehow, we will go on.

Copyright 2006 Ad Media Inc.