Modern Monday: The Vanished Birds - A Review

A glowing review by Paul DiFilippo and a Hugo nomination prompted me to read The Vanished Birds by Simon Jiminez, which got hailed as one of the best books of the year, and one of the best first books by any author.

Now that I've read it, I wonder why.

The story begins with a boy named Kaeda, who works in the fields of Umbai-V as a simple farmhand living a simple life. As a boy, he meets the dark and lovely Nia Imani, who returns to the planet every 15 years with one of the many spaceships which come to collect the harvest. The boy is entranced with her, but can scarcely say why. She gives him a flute as a gift, then disappears.

15 years later, Kaeda meets Nia again. Due to the effects of "pocket" space travel, Nia has only aged 8 months, while Kaeda is now a strapping young man. Yet Kaeda has been unable to form any romantic attachments to the young women of his village due to the feelings he developed for Nia all those years ago. They make love, start a one-every-15-year-fling, and the story goes on.

Kaeda eventually marries a former girlfriend, adopts her two daughters, all the while growing older with every 15-year period he meets Nia and makes love to her. Eventually he's an old man, is elected mayor of his town, and then something odd happens.

A spaceship crashes nearby. An escape pod somehow survives the crash well enough to have protected a small boy. He cannot speak, is badly bruised, and the villagers instantly do not like him. But Kaeda takes him in, gifts him the flute, and eventually hands him off to Nia, who takes him in.

Yes, ALL THAT just to set up the small boy - who is in fact, the real main character!

We then flash back to Fumiko Nakajima, a woman bred by extremely beautiful celebrities to be smart rather than beautiful. She has a huge back story. She overcomes the obstacles of her ugliness, becomes highly educated, and takes on a job with the Umbai Corporation to design and build the next generation of space stations. (Yes, that's Umbai as in Umbai-V. This is the beginning of a galactic empire, here.) During the lead time before departing for this huge space-station-building job, she meets and falls in love with an unusually beautiful woman named Dana. But she's forced to leave her, because she'd signed an unbreakable agreement to design the space station. Dana writes to Fumiko, but after many years of waiting, finally sends a "Dear John" letter, telling Fumiko that she couldn't wait any longer, and was getting married. Not long after, Fumiko's space station, Pelican Station, was completed, and it and the stations that followed made Fumiko so rich and famous that she was virtually immortal.

And ALL THAT just to set up the next leg of the story!

Nia and her crew arrive from fold-space at Pelican Station. The crew can't stand him, even to the point of one of them breaking the boy's flute so the noise wouldn't bother them. But Nia is attached to the boy, docking the pay of the woman who broke the flute, even though that person was Nia's closest friend. Once at the station the boy is taken into custody of the Allied Worlds. Nia finds that she is beside herself with worry over the boy. But Fumiko takes a strange interest in him as she believes him to be one of those rare people who can jaunt to other places in an instant. Why she wants him, and for what purpose, is not made clear, but she hires Nia to protect the boy for a period of 15 years, or until his abilities manifest. She and her ship, the Debbie, must stay out on the fringes of space - out of Allied hands. To her and to each of her crew will go a sum of $2 billion for taking on the job.

Not everyone from Nia's crew agrees. Some leave, including Nurse, who broke the boy's flute. Among the replacement crew are Satorus, a middle-aged man who writes in a journal (and it is his journal that comprises much of the middle of the book), and a woman named Vayla Jensen, who seems capable, but is in fact one of the many, many Dana-like replacements Fumiko has used and discarded over the years. One of her "birds" as Fumiko describes them. Vayla is fiercely in love with Fumiko, but Fumiko sends her on this 15-year-errand anyway, oblivious to the heartbreak this causes.

Another huge interlude ensues, much of it comprised of Satorus and his journal. The boy finally begins to speak, and we learn for the first time that his name is Ahro. Ahro grows to be a respected member of the crew, even if his mannerisms are a little weird. His capability for learning seems endless, and he is put to work on the ship. Nia insists he continue with his music, especially his now-repaired flute.

Eventually, the ship returns to Umbai-V. There, on his 16th birthday, Ahro runs off, joining a party, and then getting caught away among the villagers. He causes a stir when he's brought before the Mayor, as they remember the story about the boy who fell from the sky, and strongly suspect that this is the same kid. He is sent off with strict orders to proceed to the next village where he will eventually meet up with the other trading ships and go off planet.

Meanwhile, Nia sends the entire crew out looking for Ahro. In desperation, she plays the flute, which the boy somehow hears. He pops back to her - almost instantly - but Nia doesn't see it. She is angered that Ahro ran off, but brings him back aboard.

Later, it becomes clear that this is the first time Ahro has manifested his powers. Nia and the rest of the crew are furious he kept it a secret from them. They proceed back to the agreed rendezvous point as arranged by Fumiko Nakashima - only to find that Fumiko isn't there. Instead there is an Umbai Corporation vessel which demands the return of their property.

Vayla Jenson reveals herself to be the traitor who gave away Nia and the crew of the Debbie. She drugs the boy, carries him off, then makes her escape. In the fracas, some of the crew are killed. Satorus sustains a near-fatal head injury. Nia survives, but is incapacitated. The Debbie and her crew are left derelict.

And here, the language use that Jiminez employs begins to get more and more cryptic, because Fumiko Nakashima has apparently been arrested and imprisoned for the crime of keeping Ahro from the Umbai corporation. When we return to Fumiko as a character, she is trying to tunnel her way out of her prison - a remote asteroid - but she is also somewhat insane. She hallucinates her dead lover, Dana, from time to time.

Meanwhile, Vayla Jensen is slowly going insane, herself. She betrayed Nia and Ahro out of resentment towards Fumiko for abandoning her, but she's still in love. She still wants to go to Fumiko and beg her forgiveness.

Fumiko successfully completes her tunnel through the asteroid and finds the command center. She finds a small explosive that was part of the tunneling arsenal which built her prison. She is also able to rewire communications. She messages Vayla with a simple message: "She is alive." Vayla knows this means Fumiko, and immediately goes to her. But as soon as she and her schooner arrive at the asteroid, Fumiko shoots her right through the head. Fumiko takes Vayla's small, schooner spacecraft, which in her delerium, she sees as something like a boat floating in a river. She and "Dana" board, and a "boatman" (perhaps something like Charon on the Styx) rows them off.

Ahro is literally vivisected by the Umbai Corporation. He is placed inside a canister and kept drugged. Eventually they succeed in duplicating Ahro's ability to jaunt by taking a small droplet of his blood and inserting it in a computer chip. Any ship equipped with this chip can blink through space in an instant, no need to rely on fold-space. Soon, the Umbai reach grows by leaps and bounds. Their profits grow fat, and Ahro grows thin.

It is when Nia boards a jaunt-capable ship and plays the flute in honor of Ahro that something strange happens. The ship jaunts unexpectedly to some unplanned point in space. Nia realizes Ahro may be alive, and plans to return to him. She procures a ship, and ferries passengers only to make enough money to play her flute and allow Ahro to jump her closer to him. She takes the still-injured Satorus with her. He continues to write in his journal, even though writing is now difficult for him. But Ahro can't seem to bring Nia closer. His jaunts are random, and Nia eventually loses hope. With her last effort, and his, he jaunts her ship back to Umbai-V. There, Nia disembarks.

At the Umbai lab where Ahro is kept, Fumiko Nakashima arrives with Vayla's schooner. Presumably she was hunting for Ahro's location and finally found it. She crashes her vessel into the lab and detonates the explosive device.

And with a final herculean effort, Ahro jaunts himself, and the capsule which imprisons him, to Umbai-V, where Nia finds him. Presumably, he landed in the same crater where his escape pod landed back when he was a boy.

It's a beautiful tale, and reviewers are all excited about Jiminez' use of Samuel-R.-Delany-like language. But it has some key flaws. First, it starts off with a HUGE tale about someone who isn't even the main character (thanks for the stab in the back, Simon). Then, he paints another HUGE back story about a character who goes insane anyway. Really? Was all that necessary? Did we have to work so hard to understand a character who ended up so incomprehensible?

And then there's the BIG question, the one which nags at me long after I've put the book down: Why did Fumiko want the boy? Was she simply trying to keep his potential out of the hands of the Umbai Corp. because she resented it for keeping her from her beloved Dana, whom she later lost? Did she simply want the boy so that she could develop the jaunt technology based on his blood and keep all the profits? Or was it something else? The motives of Fumiko are key to the entire book, yet despite the unbelievably long route we took to understand her entire childhood and background, we know nothing about why she took interest in a boy who could potentially teleport!

After all that effort just to take aim, why miss the mark so badly?

Germans call this type of novel a Bildungsroman. In truth, this is a build, and build, and BUILD-ungsroman!

Yes, it's a pretty tale, and Jiminez uses a beauty of language that is lovely, but goddamn does it ever take the long, long, LONG way around! And still leaves a huge hole afterward.

I would give it 4 out of 5 stars, but I'm forced instead to mark it "incomplete." The hole in the text must be repaired. THEN it will be a masterpiece!

Eric

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