THE BIRDCATCHER
by Alan Conrad
FOREWORD
Novels don't customarily come with forewords. Few readers want any
preamble and the publishing industry does its best to please them. But during
the seven years spent writing The Birdcatcher I encountered so much hostility
to some of the ideas in the book that I decided some kind of explanation, or at
least a warning, was needed. And since North American publishers refused to
have anything to do with the book, I was free to do whatever I wanted.
In a writer's group where I once presented sections of the book, someone
said it was hard to imagine two people falling in love with each other while
working together in an office. That remark may have said more about some
contemporary writers than it did about offices. But it seemed to me at the time
just one more proof of how sadly limited the modern view of the world has
become.
In the midst of the drudgery and superficiality of our existence, including all
the crass entertainments concocted to disguise this, you can still find beauty,
mystery and romance if you look for them. But to spot them, you have to look
at life honestly, and with courage. That means seeing the bad as well as the
good, facing up to all of it, including those parts of our lives that few of us want
to talk about.
Some people in the insurance claims industry will see The Birdcatcher as a
betrayal. I can hear them already saying to each other - 'It might be true, but he
should never have said that.' Others will say that I'm just an idiot who didn't
know any better. They may be right. For, after all, those of us who work in the
claims business are no less human than anyone else. Callousness, hypocrisy,
deceit and self-serving are present in all human circles, not only in ours. If
claims people are to be condemned for anything, then the whole of western
society belongs in the dock with us.
But anyone who really knows claims work and is prepared to read the book
through to the end, should see that it's more a defense of the insurance industry
than an attack on it.
I don't just want to tell claims people that – I also want to thank them.
Ninety per cent of the dialogue in the book wouldn't be there if it wasn't for
them – I mean not only adjusters and other claims staff, but lawyers,
paralegals, rehab consultants, doctors, and so many claimants too. I believe
every one of them has contributed to the story, that they are all, to some
extent, co-authors of this book.
Then I have to say something to those who are young and newly married,
especially those hoping to have children. Though The Birdcatcher may seem to
take a dim view of their prospects, I want them to know that I'm no enemy of
marriage. Like my character and literary brother Christopher Stone, I'm
pessimistic about what can be accomplished in marriage, at least compared with
what we've been taught to expect from it. But I'm not opposed to it.
The original family, that is to say the nomadic group of parents, brothers
and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents that roamed the world as a
band of hunter gatherers for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, was a
permanent family. People were born into it and they lived their entire lives
within it. They lived and died in the presence of people they loved and trusted,
not among strangers, not in schools, workplaces and hospitals surrounded by
people unrelated and unsympathetic to them. Because of that, they knew a
security and permanence then that we are no longer allowed to know.
The prehistoric family, at least that communal one, must have been more or
less indestructible until the advent of tribalism and warfare.
The modern world, this set of gigantic collectives that emerged from
tribalism, couldn't allow those families to continue. Families were too inde-
pendent, too defensive of their own ways. They had to be destroyed in order
that bigger 'families' could be created, in order that a world bent on social and
territorial expansion, war, and wealth accumulation, could operate on larger and
larger scales. Though the old ways hung on in a shadowy fashion, as they still
do, through what we call the extended family - more strongly in some ethnic
groups than others - civilization demanded that the physical family become the
monogamous model, one man and one woman with their children, because that
fit most efficiently into its scheme and had the least power to resist its demands.
If a family is, as is sometimes said, a kind of tree, it's as if forests of great
trees that once covered the world were cut down and, in their place, rows and
rows of new saplings were planted. But these saplings, these little families that
make up today's civilization, are cut down before they're allowed to grow to
any size. They aren't allowed to mature, to reassemble the ancient family and
roam the world again in the old way, the way the genes within each of us still
want us to do. Instead, children are taught now that they must abandon the
family as soon as they become adults, so they can be 'independent' - which
really means dependent on a larger world that has its own plans for them.
Is it any surprise that during the second half of the twentieth century, and
now in the twenty-first, the rates of anxiety, depression and suicide have been
growing steadily, especially among the young?
Maybe there isn't much we can do about it, but I think it's important to face
the truth of it, to understand what has been done to us. If we can recog-nize
that our instincts have been caged and corralled, that we have become a great
domesticated, though discontented, herd, maybe we can at least under-stand
the limitations of the modern family, realize why it can't deliver all the security
and happy social interaction that humanity once knew and people still crave. If
we can do that, maybe we can set ourselves on the road to some kind of
solution.
Next, I have to apologize to veterans of the Vietnam War, of all nation-
alities, living or dead, since I was not there. I had no right, or any qualification,
to say anything about it.
Because of that, I tried hard to keep Chris Stone out of that war, but he
insisted on going.
Born just after World War II myself, when the smoke had barely stopped
rising, with the French war in Vietnam and the Korean War under-way before I
was five years old, I grew up surrounded by a war culture. The stories, real
and imaginary, were there in newspapers, comic books, novels and films every-
where you turned. I read and watched them all. I took in everything I could get
my hands on and learned a lot about modern warfare. For example, I knew
quite a bit about the difficulties of street fighting, where every house and build-
ing can be a separate, hotly contested, but unrecorded battle. So, when the Tet
offensive began in January 1968 and American marines spent the next month
retaking the ancient city of Hue, I, every morning on a park bench in Mexico
City, read the newspaper accounts of the fighting with more than average
interest.
Throughout Vietnam, that was some of the fiercest fighting of the war – in
one week of February alone 541 American soldiers were killed. Reading
between the lines, I was impressed by the courage required, on both sides, to
do what was being done.
That's when I began to sense that something was going on in South East
Asia that was important to everyone in the world, yet, apparently, beyond
anyone's understanding.
About that time I spent two days hitchhiking from Guatemala City to the
southwestern border of Mexico. It was a magical forty-eight hours traveling
through unheard of country as beautiful as any on or off this earth. First on
alpine highways, then gravel roads, then nothing but bush tracks winding
through low, intensely green mountain forests, I road mostly in military
vehicles, since that country was also in the midst of a guerrilla war. They had
been fighting for ten years already, and would fight for twenty more.
During the first afternoon I looked at a soldier of peasant Indian stock
sitting opposite me in the back of a jeep, his dark skin and his clothes so
covered with dust, as were mine, that he and white Anglo-Saxon me looked
little different in color. Unperturbed by the dust, the rough ride and the
monotonous hours, he watched the road and the passing forests as if it didn't
matter in the slightest what might be around the next turn, or how many more
years his war would last. Contemplating him, I had the thought that, one day, I
would have to write about these things.
Twelve thousand Canadians went to Vietnam, most of them young. I had
to send Christopher Stone with them because his story is a tale of the last half
of the twentieth century and no story about that time can talk with authority
about it without including Vietnam.
Then I have to acknowledge my debt to all the writers who have been
important to me since I was a boy. A few of them are mentioned in The
Birdcatcher. Someone once said that, if we are able to see farther now than
people of previous centuries, it's only because we stand on the shoulders of
giants. That's completely true of me. But I don't only owe my ideas, or any
writing talent I may have, to others. I'm in debt for all kinds of things. For
example, though all my life I've been interested in every living thing, large or
small, and though I've known some deer mice personally, I've never met one in
the middle of a lake as Christopher Stone does in chapter XXII. I owe my
knowledge of that possibility to the naturalist and adventurer R.D. Lawrence,
who reported just such an intrepid mouse in one of his many books.
Finally, I have to say that, prior to this book, during the first thirty years of
my writing life, I wrote mostly science fiction. Given what I've said in The
Birdcatcher about the nature of solitary versus social people, someone is sure
to say I haven't stopped. But I don't think I need to apologize to anyone, even
to the scientific community. Though they may disagree with my ideas, those
ideas are founded on evidence that they developed. If The Birdcatcher is, as
someone has said, just the story of the ugly duckling retold, it has been told this
time in the light of twentieth century science.
If they really want to quarrel with me (I would readily debate any of them –
geneticists, paleontologists, anthropologists or psychologists), they might wait
on my next book, in which I'm going to take those ideas farther.
All I'm really asking for the moment is that we give up this notion that
we know who we are. Having named ourselves 'Homo Sapiens' (the 'wise
hominid'), a title as arrogant, and probably as incorrect, as we could have
chosen, we seem to be mesmerized by the name. We seem so convinced of
our existence as a single species, superior to all others, and so sure that the
world belongs to us, that we appear to be blind to any other possibility. If we
can put those assumptions aside and wait on the long term outcome of ongoing
research - I mean especially the examination of DNA and fossils that is
gathering speed around the world - I think we'll be better prepared for the
surprises that are inevitably coming.
For now, I'll just say that I believe there are men and women alive whose
ancestors didn't travel in those communal family bands, that some of us are
descended from a different people, from humans who walked the earth more
or less alone for a very long time, facing its dangers and mysteries with nothing
more than their own wits. I believe that people exist today whose ancestors
didn't suffer in the same way when the communal family was destroyed, be-
cause they were never part of it. But that's Christopher Stone's story and I'll
leave it for him to tell.
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