Brian DoyleThe Plover: A Novel

Within the last 6 months I've read 4 of Doyle's works. Starting with the one I enjoyed most, One Long River of Song. Mink River, The Plover and Martin, Marten followed in quick succession. Doyle's work meanders and rhythmically flows and with wonderful wordplays, Whitmanesque parallelism and listings that might be off putting to some readers. But give it a chance. Doyle works his characters into complex, fascinating individuals who confront all too human ( or animal) problems. Doyle is a treat to read.

This book tells the story of an Irishman, Declan, who sails on a very small boat, the Plover, rigged with one sail and meant to accommodate one or two people. His ocean voyage brings him to accommodate more and more passengers through various circumstances, including a huge woman, Taromauri; a man Pipo, and his disabled daughter, Pipa; a minister and singer Danilo; as well as a gull and warbler. His boat is pursued by a boat named the Tanets, captained by Enrique who is a malevolent man. Through these characters the author writes about the nature of people and their changing and endless possibilities. The Pacific Ocean becomes another main character, with its changing and unending possibilities. The implication of his story is the possibility a better world, the connecting of sea, land, sky, and universe as one.What is mesmerizing and delightful it the style of writing Doyle uses—the Irish ear for words and sounds. The book is meandering, looping words and long sentences of rhyme and alliteration in a stream-of-conscious manner. In this way, he describes daily routines, his observations of the sea and weather, his frustrations and pleasures having such a company of sea travelers. The reader comes to know the main character Declan as a grouchy yet generous man, intently independent, but accommodating. He really has a big heart. The book is a book of word-love

I had trouble getting into this book largely because I was in a rush. Once I began finding friends and relatives who loved the author, the book and explained a little about "magical realism" I slowed down, startled laughing to myself at the clever (and often crude use of language) and really enjoyed myself. It helps that I have visited Hawaii a number of times,lived in Oregon and am familiar with the Pacific Ocean.

Complicated in many ways. Simply an enjoyment for the heart. I found it amazing that the characters were developed so well without your suspecting you were reading "character development" . I am so lucky to have selected this book, well worth the time investment. Please understand I am an aging person and am very jealous of my time.

THE PLOVEROregon can be very proud. Brian Doyle has a new book is about travels on a small retrofitted fishing craft, The Plover, named after a nondescript little bird that is nonetheless a tough traveler of great distances. The protagonist sailor Declan, a minor character in Doyle’s earlier Mink River, sets out from the Oregon coast, heading west. Far west.The Plover is poetry masquerading as prose, and delightful hints of literary lingo (and bits of Gaelic and Hawaiian, pidgin and not) find their places in this eccentric sailor’s lengthy yarn. A liar’s lingo: “no thinking on this trip… and don’t get all literary on me either.” Declan declaims that we should say things just once and “let them shimmer there in the air.” Never repeat. This is Doyle turning word handsprings in front of the critics and reviewers and naysayers who say he shouldn’t shouldn’t shouldn’t. For after saying shouldn’t shouldn’t shouldn’t, Declan/Doyle proceeds to do more thinking and repeating and philosophizing than a whole raft of philosophers.All in all, The Plover is a book about story. “We are starving for story, our greatest hunger.” Declan’s friend and sometime crew mate, Piko, is appointed “…captain of the Plover for one hour exactly, and Piko as his first act of command commands that everyone get off the boat for a while, onto the beach, and tell stories, but the stories cannot be about yourself, he says, smiling, they have to be about other people, we are getting all solipsistic and narcissistic on the boat, and stories are the antidote.”Also a passenger on the boat is Piko’s little compromised daughter, Pip, who is compromised because she was run over by the school bus that was supposed to be picking her up for kindergarten. She cannot walk or talk, but she adds an angelic dimension; she communicates with birds and who knows what else. She may be brain damaged, but, then again, maybe not: “I see you smiling Pip. I see you in there.”There is evil in this so lovely world, some accidental, such as Pip’s, and some foul and human evil: a modern pirate ship lurks, a looming tension through much of this fabulous fable. Piko is grabbed away from the Plover for a time by the villainous skipper, then rescued by Declan.The cruel pirate skipper apparently had a harrowing childhood, “some sailed some jailed” and a mother who disappeared: “…her body stayed but the her of her left. Burned on the altar.” (Has anyone anywhere ever written better than that?) After an abusive childhood, the skipper wants control. Money is important, and power is important—only because they bring control. And he wants revenge for any slight. Piko’s escape is more than a slight; it’s a humiliation.Declan sought the help of island officialdom to rescue Piko, and there are sadly hilarious litanies of bureaucratic solicitous kindly ineffectiveness, in the midst of which Doyle inserts this sailor’s lament: “Sometimes you can’t tell the rain from the ocean.” Seems to fit the helpless help we know of ubiquitous bureaucracy. We later learn that the bureaucrat attempts to reach his level of incompetence by running for higher political office.Taramauri is a very large island man who is actually a woman and who boards our Plover mysteriously in the night. Two rats and a warbler with a broken wing are along for the ride, as are snails and countless barnacles and other sorts of sea life that cling to boats. All this flora and fauna have opinions, of course, as do the oceans and the sky and the land.In the beginning, before any of these eccentric characters come aboard, a seagull flies above the Plover. Declan talks absentmindedly to the gull, even as he damns it as a flying rat that barfs up fish guts and poops on the cabin roof. The gull looks interested but noncommittal. After many days on the open sea with the gull as his only companion Declan awakens one morning following a furious storm to find that the gull has disappeared. Anyone who has waited until something or someone is gone to realize how much that something or someone is missed will be grabbed by Doyle’s agonizing depiction of the forsaken bereft loneliness that is the ache of all the world’s search for connection.There have been many reviewers and critics and blurblers who compare Doyle to Faulkner and Joyce and Melville and to our own poetic Whitman. I won’t do that sort of thing, other than to say that in the last Brian Doyle book I reviewed for “The Applegater,” Mink River, Doyle channeled the great mystic poet William Blake, but for Plover’s ever-perilous sea journey he often calls on the more pragmatic Edmund Burke for words to rig his jib, to keep him on course. And when that doesn’t quite meet his wordster needs, he ventures outside the lines with, “as old Ed Burke should have said but didn’t.”Feckin’. Leave it to the Irish—and Doyle is as Irish as they come (Irish by way of Brooklyn)—to take that now universal vulgarism and sprinkle it abundantly all naughty-nice. Just as at times Declan gives everyone “the cheerful finger; his usual digitous discourse.” Doyle/Declan, in the guise of Declan’s old feisty father, expends a page or two giving a very un-cheerful finger to the British, who do not rise even to the level of feckless feckin’, as he rails against them for their historical and horrid treatment of the Irish.I revel in the language—and the poignant, picayune, and powerful lessons about life—in this book; I read and re-read many passages. But I press on, just like any feckin’ reader of dime novels in the feckin’ corncrib, to find out if the pirate ship is going to again catch up with the little Plover. And I’m not telling.Highly recommended. This review comment was reprinted (with permission) from my review in "The Applegater" newspaper, Spring, 2014 issue.

Brian Doyle writes like Kurt Vonnegut without the PTSD.I50 years ago Edward Lear wrote a poem, The Jumblies, that began..."They went to sea in a sieve, they did, in a sieve they went to sea." If read as a story it was foolish, if read as a poem it was brilliant. Brian Doyle's new book, The Plover, has many things in common with The Jumblies, and that is our treat. And while it is advertised as a sequel to his fabulous Mink River, it can stand alone as a proem (prose+poem) to life, death, love, adventure, whimsy, and wordsmithing. Declan, the protagonist if there is one, states that "...basically...whatever you are sure of don't be, and as soon as you think you know something for certain, you don't."We also learn that music and singing are panaceas for our lives. This little book can be read again and again, and you will smile each time you do so.

Interesting novel about "getting away from the madding world". Although the narrative is just strong enough to carry the reader along, the writer's style is best described as hyperactive. He appears to have written it with an open thesaurus on his desk, stringing out multiple synonyms instead of taking the time to carefully choose the exact one or two, an amateurish fault. He also indulges in what one might call "Ayn-Randism", meaning inserting lengthy and somewhat tedious speeches declaiming his own philosophy about the present state of humanity into the mouths of certain characters. What has been called his "magical realism" in the style of Gogol or Marquez is interesting and even compelling, without overly straining our willingness to suspend disbelief. The flights of fancy into the minds of birds and sea creatures by the mute girl Pipa are charming, although "exposing" the faithful seagull as "one of the shining thirteen" is a bit much, as is the visit one night by the main character's vocal but invisible death on the cabin roof. And the author's Victorian tendency to lapse into the "present narrator" -- as in "Dear Reader, we have not spent sufficient ink on the sounds of the sea", etc. -- intrudes not only on the narrative flow but also further distorts the point of view, already stretched to the limit by attempting to enter the minds of the various characters. The references to some of the philosophical musings of the Irish writer Edmund Burke are good, although not always germane to the story, and one regrets the omission of that writer's most famous thoughts about political conservatism, which might have added some depth to the author's general anti-social musings. More careful proof-reading might have caught the occasional error -- as on p. 90, where the word "stern" is twice used instead of the correct word "bow". And the cover, with its picture of a herring gull with the word "The Plover" over it is an apparent gaff of laughable proportions -- even though it is made clear by page 2 that "Plover" is the name of the boat. Yet it is never explained why that name -- a bird that favours the shoreline and inland fields -- was chosen. It would have been more in character to have named the boat "The Gull," given that bird's importance in the story.Yet, overall, The Plover is an interesting read. One hopes as the author's writing style matures he will produce an even better work.