Too Many Blackbirds

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

Too Many Blackbirds is the story of a mysterious stranger, one Morgan Ballard, who, with his wife and child, descends one April day on the backwoods town of Poplar Springs, Missouri. Even in Poplar Springs, a town crowded with zanies in the best traditions of American Gothic, Morgan Ballard is weird. His well claims the life of an unfortunate local boy, his wife and her two successors perish in strange circumstances, his daughter cuts off the ear of a boy who insults her at school. Even his conversation makes no sense to the townspeople — this due in part at least to the heathen devil weed marijuana, which he generously introduces to his bewildered neighbors — and he ends by setting the house afire to kill both himself and his daughter. Needless to say, before retiring to Poplar Springs, Morgan Ballard had been — what else? — an English professor.

The truth about Ballard unfolds slowly through the novel’s 17 chapters, each of which is given to a different narrator. None is given to Ballard, and, as the reader struggles to piece his story together, a strong sense of human loneliness and alienation makes itself felt beneath the novel’s abundant and exuberant humour. This, together with the author’s wonderful ear for dialogue and folk-idiom, redeems the novel from what would otherwise be the curse of its own cleverness. (The novel is, among other things, a kind of literary jigsaw-puzzle, stuffed with adroit allusions to authors ranging from that Beowulf-poet to T.S. Eliot.) Cute is not literature, but the author has taken to heart the advice of William Faulkner (clearly one of his models) to grapple with “the old universal truths lacking which any story is doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Despite its occasional excesses, Too Many Blackbirds does indeed grapple with those truths, and the result is a first novel as gratifying as it is promising.