His entry begins:The usual motley chaos and hubbub, as always featuring the startling new (Alice McDermott’s superb Someone), the relatively obscure old (the nature stories of Charles Roberts, and Farley Mowat’s People of the Deer), and the terrific half-known-in-America (the very fine essays of Helen Garner of Australia). Also maritime adventures, mostly Alexander Kent’s series now that I finally finished Patrick O’Brian, and John le Carré’s unbelievably good The Secret Pilgrim. Q: Why do we not list le Carré when we talk about the finest writers of our time? To me he’s as good as Coetzee or Naipaul, and far better as a novelist than...[read on]About the book, from the publisher:
Declan O Donnell has sailed out of Oregon and deep into the vast, wild ocean, having had just finally enough of other people and their problems. He will go it alone, he will be his own country, he will be beholden to and beloved of no one. No man is an island, my butt, he thinks. I am that very man....My Book, The Movie: Doyle's Bin Laden’s Bald Spot.
But the galaxy soon presents him with a string of odd, entertaining, and dangerous passengers, who become companions of every sort and stripe.The Plover is the story of their adventures and misadventures in the immense blue country one of their company calls Pacifica. Hounded by a mysterious enemy, reluctantly acquiring one new resident after another, Declan O Donnell’s lonely boat is eventually crammed with humor, argument, tension, and a resident herring gull.
Brian Doyle's The Plover is a sea novel, a maritime adventure, the story of a cold man melting, a compendium of small miracles, an elegy to Edmund Burke, a watery quest, a battle at sea---and a rapturous, heartfelt celebration of life’s surprising paths, planned and unplanned.
The Page 69 Test: Mink River.
Writers Read: Brian Doyle.
--Marshal Zeringue