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Creation
 
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Creation [Hardcover]

Katherine Govier
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Katherine Govier's Creation is a superb fictionalized account of the life of John James Audubon, with a focus on a journey the famous artist took to the coast of Labrador in 1833 to observe and paint birds in the wild. While there, he befriends the Captain Bayfield of the Royal Navy, the man responsible for charting the dangerous coastline. Through the short, stormy summer, Audubon longs for his days in the lush gardens of Charleston, South Carolina, where he has left behind the lovely Maria.

With its detailed, sensuous, and at times highly suggestive descriptions of birds and flowers, and its palpable vision of Labrador's inhospitable coast, this is a book of rare beauty. Audubon is an artist obsessed with his project--a huge folio of all the birds of North America painted and engraved life-sized--and Govier captures this obsession perfectly by opening the reader's eyes and ears to what the painter sees and hears: "Tame song is beautiful, but wild song is haunting," "eggs ... emitting their strange light," or, describing a crossbill, "feet ... the golden brown of pine sap." But this is also the story of a man who was addicted to lying to hide his questionable roots (Audubon was Haitian) and who used and abused friends and family to realize his artistic vision. Govier's Audubon is a complex character of extraordinary energy and drive, who, in the end, begins to see how the magnificent fertility of nature will grow thinned and strained under man's relentless progress. A wonderful book. --Mark Frutkin

From Booklist

Canadian novelist Govier became intrigued with the tantalizing ellipsis in the record of John James Audubon's heroic if maniacal quest to paint as many bird species as he could find in the wilderness of North America. The undocumented interlude is the summer of 1833, when Audubon traveled along the treacherously stony, fog-beset, mosquito-infested coast of Labrador. Taking her cues from Audubon's stunning and dramatic portraits of the resilient birds of this hard land, Govier offers a bewitching and thought-provoking imagining of what might have transpired in Audubon's risky life, postulating a scandalous love affair with a woman painter and an unlikely friendship with the orderly Captain Henry Bayfield, who is painstakingly charting the hazardous coast. Keenly sensitive to the implications of Audubon's illegitimate Haitian birth, and fascinated by the terrible paradoxes that haunted him--that he kills what he loves most, wild birds, in order to study and paint them, and that although he loves his wife, he seeks romance elsewhere--Govier artfully conjures a brilliantly insightful and ravishingly sensuous tale of adventure and longing and portrays a seer of epic spirit who knows that his beloved feathered creatures and their wild environs are as imperiled as they are spectacular. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Driven by his birds, Jun 6 2003
By 
Kathryn C. Marks "northstar_78" (New York City, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Creation (Hardcover)
From the forebiding shoreline of the Labrador Coast to the genteel homes of American gentry, Katherine Govier takes the reader on a journey that will never be forgotten. The subject is one of the most renown naturalists of the world, John James Audubon. Seizing the moment to write about his life unknown to many beyond his skilled illustrations, his 'Birds' the author skillfully introduces him as a man with a questionable past, who suceeds against all odds to fulfill his dream.

Audubon floats through this novel like a ghost, seemingly living both in the past; his childhood in France, to the present; watching his beloved son scale the cliffs for his one desire, birds. It is these birds that fascinate him from a young age, and inevitably draw him to his demise. As he becomes estranged from not only his family, but the world around him, he delves back into the lost events of his life, trying to salvage from them his future.

The sucessful journey through the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to the Straight of Belle Isle is seen through many eyes; among them a young British sea captain, and cartographer, Audubon's former assistant, and also his wife. Not to be left out, the 'Birds' take many shapes in Govier's work, not only gracing the pages as part of the impressive story line, but also as carefully chosen prints.

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Amazon.com: 4.2 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Driven by his birds, Jun 6 2003
By Kathryn C. Marks "northstar_78" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Creation (Hardcover)
From the forebiding shoreline of the Labrador Coast to the genteel homes of American gentry, Katherine Govier takes the reader on a journey that will never be forgotten. The subject is one of the most renown naturalists of the world, John James Audubon. Seizing the moment to write about his life unknown to many beyond his skilled illustrations, his 'Birds' the author skillfully introduces him as a man with a questionable past, who suceeds against all odds to fulfill his dream.

Audubon floats through this novel like a ghost, seemingly living both in the past; his childhood in France, to the present; watching his beloved son scale the cliffs for his one desire, birds. It is these birds that fascinate him from a young age, and inevitably draw him to his demise. As he becomes estranged from not only his family, but the world around him, he delves back into the lost events of his life, trying to salvage from them his future.

The sucessful journey through the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to the Straight of Belle Isle is seen through many eyes; among them a young British sea captain, and cartographer, Audubon's former assistant, and also his wife. Not to be left out, the 'Birds' take many shapes in Govier's work, not only gracing the pages as part of the impressive story line, but also as carefully chosen prints.


5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars give it time, Aug 26 2003
By B. Capossere - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Creation (Hardcover)
It is easy to be put off by Creation in its early going. The intrusive narrator is a bit too intrusive and the reader (this reader at least) quickly wearies of the tactic and begins to consider whether the story is worth putting up with the style. Luckily, however, Govier soon leaves the authorial wonderings ("is it because he goes north and off the map? Has what happened . . . been ripped from the record?") behind and lets the two main characters, Audubon and Captain Bayfield, enfold us in their own personal stories and obsessions. Each of which in their own right is interesting enough, but it is the burgeoning relationship between the two of them, which is most captivating.
Govier takes as her starting point a "missing" point of Audubon's recorded life--his journey to the coasts along Newfoundland and Labrador. Here she imagines him meeting Bayfield, an English captain tasked with charting these same coasts. Both men, therefore, share an impossible job: Audubon to paint every North American bird, Bayfield to identify every island, every shoal, every inlet to make the waters safe for sailing. This similarity by itself is of little interest, however--who wants to read a novel full of conversations about "my job's harder than your job"? What drives the energy between the two men is not simply their shared determination to complete a monumental task, but how those tasks are in seemingly complete opposition to one another-after all, if Bayfield completes his navigation charts, allowing more men to sail freely through the northern waters, it only increases the likelihood of Audubon's chief fear--that he will never finish his work before his birds "disappear", killed by men sailing Bayfield's safe routes. The two men do not shy from conflict over this, and Govier handles their conversations skillfully, affording both men the chance to state their beliefs and without letting either slide into too-easy cliché or didacticism.
As the two men move in and out of each other's circle, their watery paths crossing and criss-crossing periodically, we move back and forth through Audubon's past and present, bearing witness to his many false names and lives, the effect of his obsession on his wife and sons, his inability to see the true worth of Maria--the woman who has replaced his wife in his heart, his shame at his origins, the self-contradictory nature of his work (killing that which he worships so he might capture its wildness on paper), and his fear for the future--both his and the wild's.
Through it all we are never left to forget for to long just what it his "great work" is--Govier brings us back again and again in superb detail to many of Audubon's specific paintings, reproduced in black and white for the novel. Some readers might find it, in fact, a bit too much detail and the same could also be said of the engraving process described toward the end of the book. These are minor complaints though and easily rectified by the reader who chooses to skim those same passages.
If there is a general flaw, I would say that sometimes Govier overwrites in the sense that she gives the reader, either through narration or, often, internal monologue, too much of what she has already skillfully and more subtly communicated to us via dialogue or description/action; she should have trusted her writing more. The same is true I think for her ending, where she could have done without the epilogue (though I understand the need some feel to tidy up just what happens to historical figures, to place the evens of the work in the historical context). Again, though, it is a minor complaint and the book as a whole more than makes up for these small flaws. Though Audubon's story and inner voice dominates the work, one derives as much pleasure from the moments we spend in Bayfield's mind or in Maria's presence or even, despite how minor a role he plays, in conversation with Godwin, Audubon's pilot. As mentioned earlier, the beginning of the book is somewhat trying, but the journey past that point is well worth it

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant plumage, but evasive, Feb 11 2005
By SkookumPete - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Creation (Hardcover)
The deeper I got into this novel, if that's what it is, the more it seemed to me like one of those birds that Audubon pursued through the Labrador wilderness. It has great beauties - some of the descriptive passages are very striking - and Govier has I think done a wonderful job of bringing Audubon to life. But at the same time, the book has a habit of flying off in all directions, so that at one moment we are clambering with Audubon over the rocks of some islet, at the next we are somewhere in his past in Europe or America, and at the next with his son in an engraving studio in England. It is also a curious mixture of fiction and what might be called documentary. Similarly we are never sure that the author's voice, when she launches into some verbal play ("North is the negative of south. North is the nesting ground, the first feathers; south is full plumage" etc.) is meant to be reflecting Audubon's thoughts, or her own.

In the end, I wished that like Audubon I could pick up a gun and bring the book to earth, so that I could put an end to its flitting from bush to bush and get a good look at it.

Govier has done her research, so it is all the more surprising that one of her characters should seem to think that James Cook is still alive in 1833, when in fact he had been dead for over half a century. She has also been betrayed by her editor in a few places -- notably the use of "lie" as a transitive verb. (I sometimes think editors do a global search-and-replace for any occurrence of "lay", whether correct or not.)

P.S. After reading Andrea Barrett's Voyage of the Narwhal, I was struck by the similarity of the two books -- both deal with naturalists journeying north and the women they left behind, and they have a similar approach to the inner lives of their characters. If you enjoyed one, you'll probably enjoy the other.
 Go to Amazon.com to see all 5 reviews  4.2 out of 5 stars 
 
 
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