The Plover: A Novel

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Masked Lapwings: Managing bird strike risk at Australian airports" (PDF). ATSB Bird Information Sheet No.3. Australian Transport Safety Bureau . Retrieved 13 May 2011. The European golden plover ( Pluvialis apricaria), also known as the European golden-plover, Eurasian golden plover, or just the golden plover within Europe, is a largish plover. This species is similar to two other golden plovers: the American golden plover, Pluvialis dominica, and Pacific golden plover, Pluvialis fulva, which are both smaller, slimmer and relatively longer-legged than European golden plover, and both have grey rather than white axillary feathers (only properly visible in flight). All in all, The Plover is a book about story. “We are starving for story, our greatest hunger.” Declan’s friend and sometime crew mate, Piko, is appointed “…captain of the Plover for one hour exactly, and Piko as his first act of command commands that everyone get off the boat for a while, onto the beach, and tell stories, but the stories cannot be about yourself, he says, smiling, they have to be about other people, we are getting all solipsistic and narcissistic on the boat, and stories are the antidote.” We’ve got dogs but we don’t take dogs to the beach in that old surfing tradition – because they can be incredibly damaging on beaches, particularly with hooded plover nests.”

The Plover is poetry masquerading as prose, and delightful hints of literary lingo (and bits of Gaelic and Hawaiian, pidgin and not) find their places in this eccentric sailor’s lengthy yarn. A liar’s lingo: “no thinking on this trip… and don’t get all literary on me either.” Declan declaims that we should say things just once and “let them shimmer there in the air.” Never repeat. This is Doyle turning word handsprings in front of the critics and reviewers and naysayers who say he shouldn’t shouldn’t shouldn’t. For after saying shouldn’t shouldn’t shouldn’t, Declan/Doyle proceeds to do more thinking and repeating and philosophizing than a whole raft of philosophers. In my 20's, I read several books by an author named Tom Robbins, who wrote wonderful novels populated by strange and wonderful characters, most of them with something that made them just a little different. This book reminds me of those novels in the same way: however fantastical the story, however unrealistic the situation, the writing is so good that I will follow those characters to the ends of the earth with no questions. And the ends of the earth is very nearly where we go aboard Declan O'Connell 's little boat,the Plover. If they see a dog – they’ll get up off the nest and try to distract the dog – and then when they do that, the eggs will cool. There are a lot of factors that make life difficult for them,” says Ro.Declan sought the help of island officialdom to rescue Piko, and there are sadly hilarious litanies of bureaucratic solicitous kindly ineffectiveness, in the midst of which Doyle inserts this sailor’s lament: “Sometimes you can’t tell the rain from the ocean.” Seems to fit the helpless help we know of ubiquitous bureaucracy. We later learn that the bureaucrat attempts to reach his level of incompetence by running for higher political office.

This book tells the story of an Irishman, Declan, who sails on a very small boat, the Plover, rigged with one sail and meant to accommodate one or two people. His ocean voyage brings him to accommodate more and more passengers through various circumstances, including a huge woman, Taromauri; a man Pipo, and his disabled daughter, Pipa; a minister and singer Danilo; as well as a gull and warbler. His boat is pursued by a boat named the Tanets, captained by Enrique who is a malevolent man. Through these characters the author writes about the nature of people and their changing and endless possibilities. The Pacific Ocean becomes another main character, with its changing and unending possibilities. The implication of his story is the possibility a better world, the connecting of sea, land, sky, and universe as one. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sourcesin this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( March 2023) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)So that’s where I’m coming from, those are my very emotional, experience-based responses to ‘The Plover.’ A few years ago I read a completely different book that had a quote that somehow applies to The Plover & to my reading of it. “Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.” (The quote is from A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.) The Plover is not my book. Not my story. It doesn't hold my memories. But when the tears leaked out of my eyes while reading, that quote is exactly what I thought of. It doesn't even make sense in a way, yet it does somehow. The Plover touched my heart & mind in so many ways. This story is well- & beautifully-told, a mix of reality & magic (not magical realism, more the magic of wonder & awe of the world we live in & with); true characters full of flaws, & wonder, & hope. A book that gave me some tears, smiles, & hope in our world. Gorgeous.

They (the plovers) need to be able to see – so you put four poles and a piece of rope and you just alert people that they are there,” Ro says. Brisson, Mathurin Jacques (1760). Ornithologie, ou, Méthode contenant la division des oiseaux en ordres, sections, genres, especes & leurs variétés (in French and Latin). Vol.1. Paris: Jean-Baptiste Bauche. p.48. Brian Doyle has spun a great sea story, filled with apparitions, poetry, thrills, and wisdom. The sweet, buoyant joy under every sentence carried me along and had me cheering. I enjoyed this book enormously." - Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia He asked me to tell him what was different about his two books in this Mink River universe, and what worked for me. I think the main part, for me, was the way he made that mystical experience more universal in ‘The Plover.’ I could identify with it more.

Breeding

There have been many reviewers and critics and blurblers who compare Doyle to Faulkner and Joyce and Melville and to our own poetic Whitman. I won’t do that sort of thing, other than to say that in the last Brian Doyle book I reviewed for “The Applegater,” Mink River, Doyle channeled the great mystic poet William Blake, but for Plover’s ever-perilous sea journey he often calls on the more pragmatic Edmund Burke for words to rig his jib, to keep him on course. And when that doesn’t quite meet his wordster needs, he ventures outside the lines with, “as old Ed Burke should have said but didn’t.” Doyle's essays and poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The American Scholar, Orion, Commonweal, and The Georgia Review, among other magazines and journals, and in The Times of London, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Kansas City Star, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Ottawa Citizen, and Newsday, among other newspapers. He was a book reviewer for The Oregonian and a contributing essayist to both Eureka Street magazine and The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia.