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Birdman

by Anthony Caplan; co-published with Hope Mountain Press

300 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #00-0095; ISBN 1-55212-430-4; US$25.50, C$29.95, EUR21.00, £14.50

A picaresque quest results when a U.S. fugitive from justice falls in with radical environmentalists in the West of Ireland. A three-way tale of intrigue, romance and false identity.

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about the book      about the author      excerpt from Chapter 11      catalogue info

About the Book First your wife leaves you and then you decide to cut loose from a dead-end existence hiding out from the police and Chupaco Reyes, King of the Colombian Mob, in your hometown. What happens? You become the Birdman. You fly away and leave your troubles behind. Or so you think. Billy Kagan lands in the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger with the idea of escaping the past, if only for a brief moment of blessed relief from the bad luck and misery that seems to dog him like a curse in the blood. Instead he falls into the clutches of rebel environmentalists and events begin to spiral in ever-tighter circles. Under the assumed name of Bert Smith, an expert on migratory seabirds in the employ of the New York Zoological Society, Kagan becomes our best hope for sanity against the ravages of post-modern ennui, industry and angst as he struggles to find solace and love in the rapidly fading Celtic twilight. This novel by Anthony Caplan offers up an intriguing blend of voices, Irish, English, American, male and female, in a tale that is a timely reworking of the picaresque. As Kagan travels the land searching for peace of mind from the ravages of his past, we get a glimpse of an Ireland not often accessible to the surveryor of contemporary fiction. A land where the myths and dreams of the past are under siege from an encroaching and homogenizing prosperity, not to mention international drug smuggling and microwave radiation. In the process, Caplan holds up a mirror to the cracks in the American dream. Review Rebirth and redemption in local teacher's new novel By Sandra Townsend Copyright 2001 HippoPress.com Imagine a man seeking to break with the past, find redemption and be reborn. Such is the main character of local writer Anthony Caplan's fourth novel, Birdman. Billy Kagan assumes a false identity as the ornothologist, Bert Smith, traveling in Ireland in his own migratory passage from the past to an uncertain future. He leaves behind a broken marriage, an estranged wife and an autistic son whose withdrawal from reality embodies the ultimate shutting down of communication and the walls between Billy and his familiar loved ones. Kagan (aka Smith) is both a sympathetic and pathetic modern man. Although in no way a romantic superhero, Kagan appears sporadically heroic in his madness, his rantings, his naked and nocturnal cavortings and his desire to connect. Alone in today's Ireland, against a backdrop of political maneuverings, environmental terrorism and international drug-smuggling, Kagan seems more buffeted by external forces than the master of his own banal existence. Caplan's poetic and evocative descriptions of Ireland are alive with the lush life of its countryside and small towns, the magic of its myths as they emerge from the mist and fog of the coastline, the charm of its pub parlance. Not unlike the peregrinations of Don Quixote, Kagan's best moments are wacky and comical. The reader needs to be patient while the three main characters come into focus, bound by their common quest for a new life and their trajectories towards a common destination, the same small village, Lamareen. Caplan--a Spanish teacher at Derryfield School---created two very strong women's voices in Angela his mother-in-law and Roxane the ex-librarian who, like Bert Smith, has shut the door on her empty past. As the personal drama unfolds, the author depicts the paradox of Europe today, as Ireland grapples with preserving its ancient Celtic soul or relinquishing it to the soulless profiteers of the new Europe. Inept in his posturing as a scholarly bird/man, Kagan nonetheless embodies the split personality of these lofty winged creatures. His character is whimsical, nomadic, even sublime at times. Kagan doggedly seeks rebirth in the fecund rich soil and heritage of Ireland. At one point, he ambles down the aisles of a well-stocked supermarket, as aimlessly as James Joyce's Bloom, marveling at the abundance of beautiful goods available to the wealthy, but also maliciously and gleefully aware of the surveillance camera whose evil eye cannot discern the intangibles: "He was not perturbed. Perhaps a shuffling air of Irish miasma was a saving grace, an ironic immunity against the enthusiasms of the age."

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About the Author Anthony Caplan was born in Caracas, Venezuela to an Irish-American mother and Russian-Jewish father. He was educated in the U.S., and has worked as a journalist in Mexico, Central America, England and Ireland. Currently he lives in New Hampshire where he teaches, writes and is rebuilding a 150-year-old farmhouse.

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Excerpt from Chapter 11

    Kagan descended from the bus in Tullamore. He examined his reflection in the window of a car and tucked in his shirt. The sun was nearly at the top of the sky, and the streets of Tullamore were filled with people, young and old, all headed in various directions at the whim of some monstrous purpose which alarmed Kagan. One thing was certain, however. Opportunity abounded in such a soup of human striving. Assuming the fervor of a revivalist, Kagan tilted his head, sucked in his gut and proceeded towards the entrance of the Joyce Hotel across the street, with pleasant hanging baskets of flowers above the door and the elegant lettering in neo-Celtic cursive above the awning.

    A long roomful of people were at table, and the bar was a brass-lined marble counter with polished taps and glasses of amber and pitch in the stages of being consumed. He took his place, wedging between two groups, one comprised of elderly nuns on their way to the horse fair at Mullingar, and to his right a couple in their late twenties, obviously well-to-do and recently married. Kagan raised his arm to the bartender.

    "The world's just exploding with ideas. There's enough brilliant ideas to sink a ship, Kathleen. That's not the point," said the groom, with the faintest trace of an American accent, as if he'd spent his university years at a college in the southwest and then had moved onto a career in Los Angeles as a pool chlorination expert/screenwriter. Then the brilliant young prodigy, winner of scholarships, including the Tullamore Historical Society's annual poetry prize for a long epic on Diarmuit and Grainne at the age of 16, had returned home with fortune made in the form of a B movie script starring Demi Moore and Joaquin Phoenix and married Kathleen, the only child of a prominent local physician. The triumphant return and betrothal followed by inevitable slough of despond, and now, apres the Tullamore Business Club lunch, the financier and freelance film executive in ponytail and Maurice Cohen suit snatches a quick Bloody Mary with Kathleen before running off to important, oh so vital meetings. Kathleen is trying to become pregnant but has so far failed to conceive. She is worried she will loose prodigy boy if not to career then to alcohol and assorted dissipations beginning to claim a large place in his spectrum of values. He lights his Cuban cigar with great fanfare. Her brow wrinkles. A sad and poignant moment in the lives of two people Kagan did not know. But he wanted to shout at them. "Stop caring so much about yourselves. Stop taking it all so seriously. Life is too short," he would have shouted, if he had really thought it would matter in the larger scheme of things.

    The nuns, on the other hand, were raucous and gleeful. Kagan dropped his arm and turned to observe them. They drank wine spritzers and twirled the twists of fruit with straws held in gnarled blue fingers. The outing was a welcoming home for sisters returning from duty in Malaysia and East Africa to the mother convent in Malahide. There was much jesting about one sister in particular who had fallen excessively into the habit of drinking coconut milk in the Seychelles. She was quiet, but with fierce blue eyes behind her glasses. Kagan glanced away from her for fear of enticing attack. She did not drink a wine spritzer. The bartender brought her over a large exotic cocktail served with a tiny, pink paper parasol implanted in a chunk of pineapple. There was a hushed air of ritual as she raised the glass from the counter. Kagan put up his arm another time.

    "Yes sir. What's your pleasure today?"

    "Whatever she's having," said Kagan.

    He'd unwittingly violated some taboo, and several nuns gave him a dirty look.

    "A pint of Guinness," he corrected himself.

    "Righto," said the bartender, eager to get away.

    While he waited for the pint to settle, Kagan continued to study the decor of the Joyce Hotel bar, the array of glasses and bottles, the back of the bartender's well-groomed head, and listen to the drone of conversations. It struck him that he was completely out of his depth, alone, and without a valid purpose other than cheating against the house rules that had relegated him to a sub-standard, astoundingly barren existence. The nuns, he knew, were resigned to such an existence, indeed they preferred their existence that way. The newlyweds were close but had not yet crossed the Rubicon of hopelessness. Perhaps they would be able to hold out. Kagan personally did not think it was possible, but he had heard that certain classes of people were able to delude themselves, stay under water, so to speak, for longer periods of time, writers, gamblers, professional criminals and actors, for instance, for whom life was always about the next dice throw, reputation never stable and ideas about the future necessarily vague and nebulous. But for the average person it became clear that yearning only yielded heartbreak, heartburn, heart attack and ridicule. Kagan took the pint gladly and thanked the bartender.

    The young married couple were joined by a large man with thinning hair who ordered a plate of ham sandwiches. He spoke to the two about people they knew in common, friends doing well in certain trades.

    "I tell you, Gillian's like a pig being fattened for fair day," he said.

    They all three laughed. Even the nuns laughed. Kagan asked the bartender if he had matches. He lit a cigarette and sucked in a lungful of smoke with purpose, back in control, a master of his own decrepitude at least. The giggles of the nuns were like the music of the sirens now, a distant roar of enticement. In fact, his ears were plugged with wax, and with pinky inserted, Kagan attempted to dislodge a plug from his left orifice. He turned around and studied the tables, avoiding eye contact if possible. The fancy women were bedecked in jewelry and fine satins, mouths on some of them moving rapidly while forming words and phrases, involved as they were in social intercourse of the higher sort. Kagan leaned against the bar wishing for intercourse of the lower sort, a wish that had grown coarse with time and now was practically fermenting in his veins. A group of five women in a variety of business costumes mounted to the bar while they waited for a table to clear. Here was Kagan's chance suddenly, to lure one tender maiden from this flock of gentle women and extract a crucial commitment to pick up his bar tab. There was a redhead in particular Kagan imagined quite crudely with long legs and rump up against the bottom of a Joyce Hotel double bed, doing the dirty Napoleon, her breasts flouncing and sweat pouring everywhere. Her aureoles would be large and vermilion, afterwards her hair smelling of the Joyce hotel courtesy shampoo and still damp as they waited for the elevator to bring them back to the lobby. Kagan's was an entirely pleasant image of genteel decay, the type that had been practiced in the bedrooms and passages of the Joyce for many years. But Kagan did not act, preferring to lean against the counter, dream and gnash his teeth, drink his beer. The beer had its short lived pleasures, though. The viscosity, the tang of essential elements, the feel and heft of the cool glass, even the wet ring the glass left on the countertop - these were the ephemera, even the reliquary of a beautiful event. The bartender asked if he was ready for another, and Kagan answered with a workmanlike nod. The bartender got to work pulling a pint from the inexhaustible keg of the stuff. Now it was down to who would pay for his pleasure.

    Explore, explore, the Yankee philosopher of the Great North Woods had once said. The world will bring you bread. With that mantra in mind, Kagan went in search of the men's room. Explore, explore, he mumbled to himself, tripping across the worn out carpeting with glass in hand. Wherever you may be let your waters run free. Now who had said that?

    A man entered the toilet talking on a cellular phone. He cupped the phone between shoulder and chin while relieving himself. Kagan washed his hands and combed his hair, watching the man in the mirror.

    "Yes. No doubt you're right, Stevens. It will hurt. We'll sell Telecom short. Drop it all. Yes. Immediately. Tell Hodgeton I said so. Righto."

    He rang off, shook and zipped himself, paced in a small circle and lit a cigarette. He was about to dial again when he noticed Kagan, pale-faced and slack-jawed, standing by the sink.

    "What's that look on your face for, my good man. Or haven't you heard?"

    "What's that?" asked Kagan, sensing a tremor about to overcome him.

    "There's been a bomb exploded in Cork. The damned paramilitaries have blown up the Mt. Hunger mast."

    "Oh my God."

    "They'd blast us back to the Stone Age if they could."

    "Holy shit."

    "But they can't, you see. Because once the fire's started you can't put it out. These West Cork renegades are still fighting De Valera's war. They think there's some sort of Celtic middle way born out of blood and toil and sacrifice. But that's not what the people want. They want fire. They want comfort. They want computers and videos and Hollywood and all the rest of it. That's what these bastards don't give a fig for."

    "Fucking hell and high water."

    "Now we're going to have a bloody time unloading with every asshole from Chicago to Tokyo in on the picture in about ten minutes. You'll excuse me."

    "Oh my God."

    "Hello, Roberts? What time is it there? Good, I've got very important stuff here for you..."

    Kagan stumbled out of the Joyce into a weak, grey-lighted afternoon in which time seemed to prolong itself unbearably. Kagan thought this was a mess of a larger order of magnitude than he had ever seen. Okay, he'd pulled a few capers in his youth, jimmied a few locks, hotwired a few new Mitsubishis right off the trestles in White River Junction and with bricks on the accelerator steered them into Joe's Pond, collected from the Campbell brothers in Mancato, Massachusetts for the service, and Johnny Campbell, he with the mythic schlong down to his knees, who used to drop quarters through his wedding ring for a party trick, and the wicked taste for fighting, interested forever more in maiming him, all because he'd sold a few panels off same Mitsubishis on the sly to a garage in Lyndonville. Getting jumped at the Packing House Lounge by the off-duty trooper with the unlikely name of Darcy Dunkle, who had broken his ribs with a pool cue. That had frankly sucked. Someday he would find Darcy Dunkle and smash in his skull, of that he was certain. Yes, there was also Chupaco Reyes, the Corona drug lord, from whom he feared horrible retribution and expected no mercy. And Moshe Abrams now dead, once in life like a father to him. Moshe, Moshe why do you follow me like a bloodhound. I didn't think it would end that way. They betrayed both of us.

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Catalogue Information

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