Once again, we're back with retired-journalist-turned-billionaire-heir Jim Qwilleran and his two Siamese (one psychic, one not), Koko and Yum Yum, in close-knit Moose County, 400 miles north of everywhere. A new Art Center has opened on Pickax city limits, and all seems perfect for opening day, save for qualms about the unsightly grange across the way - homesteaded by a stubborn old frontierswoman who refuses to change her ways. Soon, though, both farm and owner go down in a sudden blaze, the property is purchased by a shady (and anonymous) owner, and...well, whaddaya think? Is something illicit behind the string of events? Will Qwill put both felines and facial hair to work to unearth the truth? Will yet another Standard Issue Moose County Male (in the mold of Larry Lanspeak/Whannell MacWhannell/et al.) be introduced to the series in the proceedings? Was Qwilleran's mother a Mackintosh?
The mystery is a given; though the details of the crime itself aren't made immediately clear, once the (eventual) perpetrator comes on the scene, given Braun's stringent enforcement of the Moose County Code of Acceptable Native Behavior, we know there is no possible way that this irreconcilably crass, obnoxious, ornery cuss is gonna be permitted to leave the novel unindicted. I'm afraid that a throwaway, bare-bones mystery has now become a Cat Who... series standard.
What success there is rides on Sang for the Birds's superior handling of Moose County's natives; contrasted with the homogenous faces that populated the last few attempts, we have a more diverse, a more interesting, and a just plain better mix of characters this time around. Forward, cheery, outgoing radio weatherman Wetherby Goode returns from The Cat Who Tailed a Thief (albeit a tad toned down, but I'm highly grateful that he returned at all), the perfect accomplice for Qwill to pump for information and with whom to share sneaking suspicions. Also resurfacing is amiable, good-hearted yet a tad naive heiress Elizabeth Hart, who strikes up the grandfather-confidante talks with Qwilleran that made her so endearing in The Cat Who Came to Breakfast. Junior Goodwinter makes the fleetest of cameos, but I'm glad to see him at all; he's been gone for quite a while, and I was beginning to think that Braun had moved him out of the county without ceremony. And, of course, we have chuckleheaded underachiever Derek Cuttlebrink, who can amuse just through his all-too-candid demeanor and his obliviousness to his own simplemindedness. The chemistry between Qwilleran and these folks is much more fruitful and convincing, their interaction much more satisfying, and the effect makes Pickax seem much more like a community.
And yet there still are missteps in characterization, the most grating of which appears about thirty pages in, with the introduction of a whole passel of dead-end characters down at the Art Center. Though they purport to be artists, their personas are devoid of any creativity or life - they all illustrate the art world very poorly, and with the treatment that society got in The Cat Who Could Read Backwards and The Cat Who Saw Red, the whole retread here seems anemic and redundant. Save for one person, they never mix with the Moose County populace; they're highly out-of-place and never add anything to the story. They just remain isolated in their own sterile little world, as if they wandered in from another mystery series all together. It all leaves the reader wondering how Braun could get the older, familiar characters so right - and yet drop in another set so one-dimensional and completely out of place in the setting?
See, we have things that are very, very good and those that are out of place all smooshed together in one incongruous package. Which leads me to this hypothetical question - did Lilian Jackson Braun truly write the entire text of this novel? My answer is no, not based on the evidence Sang for the Birds provides - scads of glaring errors and atypical prose that Braun herself never would have written. Any veteran of the series should be deeply unsettled by about sixty pages in.
First, there is the unusually youthful slant, from the anti-DWI fake car crash at a local high school that kicks off the proceedings to the perils of gangly waiter Derek Cuttlebrink and "Butterfly Girl" artist Phoebe to the Art Center personae. This tack, for Moose County, is all wrong; an older, wiser cast in a quaint, close-knit small town from days gone by was one of the series's earmarks and made the books a refreshing break - a backlash, even - from today's crass, loud, go-go-go teenage-obsessed media. The earlier installments featured their share of young characters, yes, but Braun always presented them with mature dilemmas and responsible consciences; here, the kids seem particularly juvenile and their problems bubblegumish, brought upon themselves in their own jejunity. The triumph of baser sensibilites is all the more evident with the addition of several rather blue notes to the novel - such as a foul-mouthed parrot and a poem that operates on the premise that the word "bedpan", in itself, is inherently funny - that Braun, based on her sense of humor in previous episodes, probably would have found amusing but would not have written for inclusion in a Cat Who... book herself. It all reflects an unfamiliarity with how to culitvate the sense and mood that sets the Cat Who... series apart from hack mysteries and into its own little universe.
See, Braun, in a large part, did it through the little details. Take Qwill's rencontres with the locals - we got just enough background on each to set the person's place in the community and relationship to Qwilleran yet not so much that it broke the sense of well-worn familiarity between Qwill, the residents of Pickax, and the reader. There's no sense of that balance here, as Qwill's mental narration launches into long tracts of awkward background overkill, recounting his whole personal history with his companions as if the author her(or him)self has to be reacquainted with them. That trend resurfaces throughout the book, with the laborious dredging up of old series in-jokes like Mrs. Fisheye and Ronald Frobnitz. One could even take the examples of good characterization (since they are all previously introduced charas) as evidence of a new author who must make up for lack of experience by recalling and resurrecting what (and who) was best about the series in an insultingly overt effort to convince us that, hey, he knows what he's doing, and that this is a bona fide, full-fledged Cat Who... book. The lack of subtlety is painfully noticeable, and the purpose behind such easily decipherable.
The most telltale sign, however, is the erratic behavior of her hero. Even in the sub-par installments, Qwilleran was always Qwilleran, a gruff-yet inquisitive, sardonic, sensible, sympathetic center to steady cast and reader through the novels' crime, double-dealings, the craziness of urban bustle and rural "individuality", and, as of late, through some less-than-dazzling plot and prose stretches. In Sang for the Birds, though, we run into an occasional too-flip and - dare I say it? - ditzy remark, plus two big goofs. The first comes when he commissions a portrait of Polly so that she can be the "first thing he sees each morning", a serious misstep - Qwilleran and Polly's relationship always held a defining note of mutual respect and quiet, gentle love. Neither would ever show such overt adulation for or romanticization of the other. And I cannot abide the second - yes, we're all familiar with Qwill's penchant for exploring esoteric hobbies. But when the book ends with our favorite down-to-earth pseudo-curmudgeon actually considering collaborating on an animated feature starring cartooned crows, I must start to take issue.
I could go on, with the wandering, undirected pace of the novel (Braun would never take six or seven chapters to get this victim stabbed and slabbed) to small slip-ups in the series mythos (any veteran will know that Qwilleran did indeed discuss Koko's extra-sensory abilities with best friend Arch Riker) to the curious near-absence of Koko (and when he does appear, it's to solve petty problems and point out lost objects - look, ya can't delegate Koko to the role of a Clapper, ya hear?). See, there are several good ideas in the novel - Koko's bird garden, eccentric old-time pioneer woman Maude Coggin, the uprising against computers in the library and its subsequent solution, the spell-off - that could only have come from Braun; her touch is not totally absent. But the mistakes here are of the sort that Braun - not even the Braun who wrote Tailed a Thief - would never commit. It seems to me that she may be grooming another author to write in her footsteps after her retirement - a theory all the more plausible in light of the elegiac overtones in the story. There's considerable talk of tombstones and graves, and the poem by "James Mackintosh Qwillleran" on the jacket (the first appearance of any such work) seems like nothing but an epitaph. Most suspiciously wistful is the reassemblage of the steadfast quartet of Qwill, Polly, Arch, and Mildred, reminiscing of good times past and looking forward to resuming comfortable habits and finally winning those ever-elusive little victories, as if reassuring the reader that, hey, we'll be all right, we're right here, and we'll never change. It's the end of an era either way - and, in either case, the world will be a little less bright.
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