Patterns of migration

IN the poem “Musee des Beaux Arts,” W.H. Auden wrote of Pieter Bruegel’s “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” observing that “the ploughman may / Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, / But for him it was not an important failure.” Brad Kessler makes glancing allusion to Auden’s poem in his impressive second novel, an exquisite and erudite threnody that takes its inspiration from the Sept. 2, 1998, crash of Swissair Flight 111 off Nova Scotia, in which all 229 people aboard perished.

Like Bruegel and Auden, Kessler is drawn to how, as Auden put it, tragedy and suffering take place “[w]hile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along”: In “Birds in Fall,” Kessler imagines a plane bound for Amsterdam dropping into the North Atlantic while an innkeeper on the nearby Canadian island of Trachis prepares gravlax and a woman works in an ornithology lab hundreds of miles away in New York, from which the plane had taken off an hour and a half before. Kessler doesn’t tell us this, but you can picture it: The news of this modern Icarian tragedy blips across news wires, Yahoo news headlines and those tiny screens that flash infobytes at people riding up and down elevators who -- Auden again -- “[h]ad somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

And so the story is absorbed, digested, forgotten by the world at large. But this terrible circumstance transforms the innkeeper in question, Kevin Gearns, into an intimate of many of the bereaved -- parents, spouses, lovers -- who make their way to Trachis in the weeks after the crash. One of them is Ana Gathreaux, an NYU ornithologist specializing in migration, whose husband, Russell, head of the birds collection at the American Museum of Natural History, was a passenger on the plane and narrates Kessler’s opening chapter, a moving chronicle about an airliner in distress: “Outside, the tip of the wing looked laminated in moonlight, the Milky Way a skein above. We had started sinking fast, that much was clear, the nose of the plane dipping downward; and there was a curious chemical smell, not exactly burning, more like a dashboard left to bake in the sun.” Russell notes the passenger next to him, a classical cellist on her way to Amsterdam to perform Strauss’ “Metamorphoses,” writing her name in lipstick along her forearm; a Chinese girl sleeping nearby in peaceful oblivion as hip-hop crackles from her earphones; the pilot calling the international urgency signal “pan, pan”; a lighthouse flickering past outside; and then the sliver of a moment “before the seat belts locked our pelvises in place and unleashed the rest of us.”

Migration abounds in “Birds in Fall,” from the airborne souls who migrate from being to nothingness to the family members who fly from all over the globe to roost at Kevin’s inn, to Kevin himself, who, after years of living in New York made his way to Nova Scotia with his boyfriend, Douglas, to restore the Greek Revival Trachis Inn. In their relationship, turned increasingly clenched after the crash, there’s an achy undercurrent of loss, an unspoken understanding that their own flight was from a 1980s New York that no longer exists, one that had been devastated by AIDS.

But Ana is the heart of Kessler’s story, a hushed rumination on how one woman comes to grips with the incomprehensible vanishing of her partner. Kessler gives us the history of Ana and Russell’s romance, complete with steamy couplings in various labs at the Natural History Museum and the couple’s shared passion for winged creatures. “Birds in Fall,” it turns out, is a veritable aviary of a book, its pages bursting with sparrows, seagulls, cockatiels and kingfishers, the last of which happen to be favorites of Ana’s. (They’re the birds that the Greeks -- who come up a lot in these pages -- called halcyons, intimately connected to the Trachis of myth.) The ornithological asides give the book its delicacy and mournfulness, as when Ana, recently arrived at the craggy, wind-swept island for the fraught ritual of identifying the victims, feels “something crack inside her, something she hadn’t even known was still there: a last holdout of hope. A tiny twig, a bird bone, toothpick-thin; and it was as if just then, standing on the boulders, she heard it snap.”

But some comfort comes in the form of an impromptu family of grievers. There’s Claartija, a sullen Dutch teenager with a tattoo that bears the Dr. Seussian “Groene eieren met ham”; a Bulgarian husband mourning his cello-playing wife by pouring his grief into the inn’s neglected piano; a seriously unhinged Chinese mother’s disappearing acts and baffling rituals; and, finally, Pars, a kindly Iranian poet and graphic designer, who just might be the one to help Ana fly on toward the rest of her life.

“Birds in Fall” is a luminous tribute to Kessler’s abiding and respectful faith in the power of storytelling: There’s bold engagement here with the most contemporary fears and the most eternal preoccupations (fate, loss, mourning, healing). If, at times, Kessler’s threading through of mythology and ornithology feels like an effort to beautify the ugly reality of what happens when a packed airliner explodes into a million pieces, his instincts are true when he writes, “How is a story like a bird? It keeps us aloft.” *