New West Book Review

Patrolling the Northern Border: Jim Lynch’s “Border Songs”

By Jenny Shank, 7-06-09

Border Songs
By Jim Lynch
Alfred A. Knopf, 291 pages, $25.95

Strange things are going on around the border between Washington state and British Columbia in Jim Lynch’s rich, imaginative novel Border Songs.  On the Canadian side, retired professor Wayne Rousseau enjoys flaunting his access to medical marijuana treatment for his MS and decrying the follies of the U.S. government, and his daughter Madeline falls in with some pot smugglers, leaving a job at a nursery to become the drug operation’s head grower.  Across the ditch on the U.S. side, Norm Vanderkool’s dairy is in dire straights, his wife is losing her memory, and the cows are succumbing to mysterious ailments. 

At Norm’s insistence, the Vanderkools’ son Brandon has just joined the Border Patrol, and he’s an odd duck: six-foot-eight and dyslexic, he has trouble stringing words together in the proper order and has never fit in with regular people—his crush, Madeline, describes him as “an innocent.” But he’s a champion noticer, bird watching and creating art out of nature’s materials when he’s out on patrol.  His careful observations of the land and birds cause him to be attuned to anything that’s amiss, and he begins to discover droves of people of all nationalities trying to illegally cross the border into the U.S., many of them smuggling pot, guns, or worse.  After a string of serendipitous busts, Brandon earns a nickname on the B.P.: “shit magnet.”

Meanwhile, Sophie Winslow recently moved into the neighborhood, set up shop as a masseuse, and has begun to gather the gossip and secrets of everyone in town.  She frequently hosts parties at her renovated house: “Sophie’s game plan was simple: Assemble the best-connected gossips she could find—bankers, nurses, pharmacists and others—and engage them in mindless gambling, then add liquor, and type it all up later.”

Written with humor, striking imagery, and colorful characters, Border Songs is a winning novel that satirizes the United States government’s concern about terrorism and unsafe borders—reaching a hysterical pitch in this book—but the characters, ridiculous though they can be, never come across as less than fully human.  The story artfully cycles around Lynch’s gentle giant protagonist, a memorable character if there ever was one.

In addition to his imposing stature, Lynch has invested Brandon with some qualities of two singular individuals whom he thanks in his acknowledgments: animal behaviorist and autism expert Temple Grandin, and land artist Andy Goldsworthy.  Like Grandin, Brandon “thinks in pictures” (as his mother points out), and can read animals better than he can read people.  He knows what puts the dairy’s cows at ease, and what agitates them, such as his father’s raised voice and other startling noises.  “He once felt a calf’s heart rate double at the ring of his father’s cell phone.” Brandon’s primary animal interest is birds, and when he’s out on patrol looking for places to spot birds, he’s often inspired to start creating art with the materials at hand, as Goldsworthy does, such as cones made of slate.  But Brandon probably wouldn’t use the term “inspired"—he works at an intuitive level, in sort of the same way that birds follow their instincts to construct nests.

Lynch’s descriptions of the birds Brandon observes are lovely, such as this one about a flock of barn swallows: “Another dozen were approaching from far north of the ditch, then an incoming cloud—multiple clouds, actually—that broke up as they neared the three lines, the birds spinning like ice skaters or stunt pilots before lining up side by side and carrying on in high, grating voices that sounded like glass marbles rubbing against one another.”

While he’s out in the field, Brandon notices when the birds are acting strangely, and this leads him to all sorts of discoveries—a local trying to sneak Chinese people across the border in the back of a van, a young man with bomb materials and the plans for the Seattle Space Needle in his car, drug smugglers, and other people of unknown origin just trying to get across.

Brandon’s busts ignite a border-securing frenzy that culminates in the mounting of cameras along the border.  The camera footage reveals the extent to which almost all the locals are implicated in some kind of odd or illegal behavior. 

Quirky, funny, fresh, and lyrical, Border Songs will win over just about any reader. 

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