The Bird Skinner
Alice Greenway, 2014
Grove/Atlantic
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802121042
Summary
Jim Kennoway was once an esteemed member of the ornithology department at the Museum of Natural History in New York, collecting and skinning birds as specimens. Slowing down from a hard-lived life and a recent leg amputation, Jim retreats to an island in Maine: to drink, smoke, and to be left alone.
As a young man he worked for Naval Intelligence during World War II in the Solomon Islands. While spying on Japanese shipping from behind enemy lines, Jim befriended Tosca, a young islander who worked with him as a scout. Now, thirty years later, Tosca has sent his daughter Cadillac to stay with Jim in the weeks before she begins premedical studies at Yale. She arrives to Jim’s consternation, yet she will capture his heart and the hearts of everyone she meets, irrevocably changing their lives.
Written in lush, lyrical prose—rich in island detail, redolent of Maine in summer and of the Pacific—The Bird Skinner is wise and wrenching, an unforgettable masterwork from an extraordinarily skillful novelist. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1964
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—Yale University
• Currently—lives in Edinburgh, Scotland
Alice Greenway divides her time between the United States and Britain. Her first novel, White Ghost Girls, set in Hong Kong in the 1960s, won the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and was on the Orange Prize longlist. She currently lives in Scotland. (From the publihser.)
Book Reviews
Jim's memories of his wife give the novel its erratic heartbeat; thankfully, she escapes the usual fate of a romanticized dead wife and comes across as fully human. Violence has its part in Greenway's thrilling evocation of young love, and so does great tenderness. Their relationship is as fresh as it is heartbreaking. With an attention to detail that's both poetic and precise…Greenway evokes so much more than the weather and mood of her locales. In literature, the natural world frequently exists behind a gauzy scrim. But
Joanna Hershon - New York Times Book Review
Alice Greenway’s quietly devastating portrait of a man ravaged by loss and guilt would be unbearably sad if it weren’t also so sensitively written and gently understanding of human frailty.... Sensitively written and gently understanding of human frailty.... Greenway’s rapturous prose and warm empathy assert that there is beauty to be found in even the unhappiest lives.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post
Evocative...image-rich... The distinctive environments of disparate islands, interwoven with alternately romantic and horrific flashbacks, create a beautiful, ultimately painful story as haunting as its settings. Gifted at evoking places in the past, Greenway is at her most poignant in moments when outsiders and natives, from hot climates and cold, come face to face, attempting to connect across geographic, cultural, emotional, and psychological divides
Publishers Weekly
A visit from a wartime companion's daughter stirs up unwelcome memories for an embittered ornithologist in this follow-up to Greenway's...White Ghost Girls (2006).... Readers who don't mind the novel's leisurely pace and brooding tone will appreciate Greenway's limpid, poetic prose; her richly nuanced portraits of a nicely varied cast of characters.... Sensitive and finely written.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The anchor of The Bird Skinner is the title figure, Jim. What makes this misanthropic man an endearing character? Why do the other characters care about him?
2. Why is Jim so resistant to Cadillac’s arrival? What are his excuses? Are they understandable?
3. Discuss how Jim has set himself apart throughout his life. In what ways has he always been an outcast and recluse, from childhood through old age?
4. With what curse does Jim’s grandfather haunt him? How does this curse manifest in Jim’s relationship with Fergus?
5. Despite Jim’s flaws as a father, Fergus cares for and looks after him. Talk about how their roles as father and son change throughout the story.
6. Discuss Jim’s identification with Long John Silver in Treasure Island. How does his obsession with Old Providence reflect his self-image as a gruff, one-legged pirate?
7. What do Jim’s memories reveal about Helen? How does her death relate to his memories of war, and to his posttraumatic stress? Helen’s story is revealed late in the book. Why might this be the case, and is it effective?
8. Is the end inevitable? Do the demise of Helen and Jim’s thoughts about Papa Hemingway foreshadow the conclusion?
9. After the sailing catastrophe, when Jim falls ill, he is sent to Cumberland Island to recover. As an old man “he sees now how his life followed a distinct trajectory, veering ever south from the islands of the Penobscot, down to Georgia, out into the Caribbean, across to Indochina, finally landing him on the shores of the equatorial Pacific” (p. 213). What has island life offered Jim? How did it lead him to and enable his work? Did the island of Manhattan offer similar opportunities?
10. In the Solomon Islands, the field hospital surgeon is overwhelmed by a new epidemic: “‘Some fifty to a hundred mental cases a day.’ Panic, fear, and collapse had swept through the troops as virulently as malaria or dysentery … ‘War neurosis is the current diagnosis’” (p. 186). Is “neurosis” an understandable response to war?
11. Consider the following passage: “Normalized abnormality is how Dr. Harding diagnoses Jim … Actions that seem abhorrent and even criminal to those still living a civilized life become the norm in war … a certain callousness or savagery is … what a man needs to survive here” (p. 189). Does this justify Jim’s behavior toward the dead Japanese soldiers? What light does the Solomon Island tradition of headhunting throw on his actions?
12. Discuss the ways that Cadillac provides Fergus with the warmth and support that he lacked from his father. What are the similarities between his memories of his mother and his experiences with Cadillac?
13. How does Cadillac’s upbringing in the Solomon Islands influence her ambition, her confidence, and her good temperament? In what ways did her childhood lead her to medical studies?
14. Jim was an enigma to his colleagues at the museum. What do Michael and Laina learn about him through Michael’s assignment?
15. Greenway’s keen eye and knack for description evokes a plenitude of vivid scenaries. What are some of the most memorable scenes and images?
(Questions by Barbara Putnam; issued by the publisher.)
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