Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1319564 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Amazon.com Review
In the same calm, revelatory manner in which he wrote The Bird Artist, Howard Norman begins Devotion by telling of an event and then moving forward and backward from it. On August 19, 1985, the day that David Kozol and Margaret Field return to London from their honeymoon, David and his father-in-law, William Field, are involved in a fracas that leaves Field in the hospital. Not until almost the end of the book do we find out the cause.

David's life began heading toward that moment when he first laid eyes on Margaret, traveling as a publicist with an orchestral ensemble, and fell instantly in love with her. They are married in a few months. David wants to write a book about his mentor, Josef Sudek, a Czech genius, and Margaret enjoys traveling with the orchestra, checking in daily with her father, who tends an estate in Nova Scotia owned by a Jewish couple, Stefania and Isador Tecosky, and the wounded swans who live there. After William is hurt, David takes over his estate duties but Margaret refuses to see him.

Norman brings these people and their disparate realities together by showing the real devotion that binds them to each other and to the swans. William and Margaret enjoy a strong filial bond, the Tecoskys are devoted to William and Margaret, and the swans provide the perfect metaphor for all the relationships: they have had their wings clipped so they cannot fly--and they mate for life. Norman is a born naturalist with an immense love for Nova Scotia, birds, and landscape combined with a towering literary capability to bring them all together in a quirky, interesting story. Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly
Norman's intriguing, if at times baffling, sixth novel opens with a fight between Canadians David Kozol and his father-in-law, William Field, outside a hotel in London "on the morning of August 19, 1985." That date is important—it's just days after Kozol's marriage to William's daughter, Maggie—and an ensuing accident seriously injures William, the caretaker of a Nova Scotia estate on the north shore of the Bay of Fundy. The result is a particularly strange domestic situation: Kozol assumes William's duties on the estate; Maggie refuses to see her husband; William vows revenge on his son-in-law. Uncovering why the men were fighting and what separates the young couple drives the plot. Norman (The Bird Artist) uses the avian world as a counterpoint to the human one. William is devoted to the swans on the estate; Maggie wants in her own life the kind of devotion the swans embody. This quirky story deals with a powerful theme: how love endures despite our best efforts to sabotage it. Author tour. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Stephen Amidon

Howard Norman's fiction often deals with the intersection of crime and art, a crossroads he usually locates in one of North America's most out-of-the-way places. The Haunting of L., for instance, featured a photographer who might have been involved in mass murder in the wilds of Manitoba, while The Museum Guard detailed a case of art theft in a tiny Nova Scotia museum. And his finest novel, The Bird Artist, dealt with a young painter in the far reaches of Newfoundland who confesses to murder.

Although Norman's new novel, Devotion, also deals with art and crime, this time the offense in question takes place in a much more well-traveled locale: "In London on the morning of August 19, 1985, David Kozol and his father-in-law, William Field, had a violent quarrel on George Street. In a café they came to blows. Two waitresses threw them out. On the sidewalk they started up again. William stumbled backward from the curb and was struck by a taxi. The London police record called it 'assault by mutual affray'."

The cause of this ruckus is David's apparent betrayal of William's daughter, Maggie, to whom he has been married for just a few days when his father-in-law finds him in a compromising position with another woman.

Despite this atypically urban opening, both assailant and victim soon return to what for Norman is always the true scene of the crime: easternmost Canada, in this case an isolated estate in Nova Scotia where William serves as caretaker and swan-keeper. Here, David sets out to atone for his transgression by nursing William back to health. It proves no easy task. Although William's injuries include a damaged larynx, his temporary muteness does not stop him from tormenting David. As for the now-estranged Maggie, she requires more of David than the usual excuses, since "no ordering or reordering of events could save him from the effects of his own folly."

After this turbulent opening, the novel's focus switches from violence to love, as the history of David and Maggie's whirlwind romance is recounted. David, an aspiring photographer, is teaching in London when he meets fellow Canadian Maggie, the publicity director for a Halifax orchestra. Their relationship is consummated within hours; they are married three months later. And yet, even after a blissful honeymoon in Scotland, some imp of the perverse causes David's judgment to lapse badly.

The same spirit and pride that drew Maggie to David now propel her far away from him, leaving David to seek whatever expiation he can from her wounded father. The prickly relationship between these two stubborn, idiosyncratic men provides the novel's best passages. With the estate's "four preening armadas" of swans bearing silent witness, their mutual pasts unfold. The violence of William's reaction to his son-in-law's behavior becomes more understandable when his own distant infidelity with a local beauty is revealed. The roots of David's self-destructive streak, meanwhile, can be traced to his feelings of creative inadequacy, especially when he compares his work to that of his idol, the great Czech photographer Josef Sudek.

"After photographing in Prague whenever he could," Norman writes, "it became evident that his work was at best second-rate Sudek, all inherited sensibility, the master's influence insistent in almost every photograph David took, even those he meditated on for weeks in advance. This was a kind of artistic malady."

Norman fleshes out this story of fall and redemption with striking, beautifully rendered detail that perfectly captures "what inventive stupidities people were capable of when wounded and confused, no matter their native intelligence. No matter their love for each other." The novel's funniest moment comes when William recounts the story of a local skywriter who loses his job -- and his mind -- after repeatedly declaring his love for a married woman in the skies above her house. While honeymooning in Scotland, David and Maggie witness a sight that becomes emblematic of the book's central theme of devotion: a passing car, driven by an elderly woman, with a live swan in the back seat. "She's devoted to it beyond the logical, and why?" their waitress explains. "Because she thinks the swan's her dear departed husband."

Before David's own devotion to Maggie can be re-established, he must undergo one last ordeal, a bare-knuckled rematch with William that leaves David with his jaw wired shut. First William, then the swans, and now David -- it is a testament to Norman's immense skill that a story that depicts so much muteness can still speak so eloquently.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

"I'll forgive and forget, but I'll remember."


Imagery is central to Devotion, the issue of communication couched in a broken romance. The novel begins with an altercation between David Kozol and his father-in-law, William. Suffering of late from the estrangement of his wife, Maggie, David has not quite ascertained how to rectify his marital predicament. It is assumed that some form of infidelity is at fault in the severing of trust, the two men possessing conflicting views in regards to the state of the marriage, David's father-in-law siding naturally with his disappointed daughter.

The fast-forward romance between the newlyweds is as passionate as their current distance is poignant, the attraction immediate and mutual from the start, two Canadians meeting by chance in London. Later, back in Nova Scotia after the accident, David's supposed misdeed hanging over the relationship like a dark shadow, the new husband takes over William's estate management duties. The estate is owned by an elderly couple and serves as a refuge for swans, the mute birds central to the story and indicative of the ambiguity of form and intent. For though they are majestic, the swans are ill-tempered and difficult, much like humans. These particular humans fumble through a tripartite relationship, where father serves as buffer for daughter, the lack of communication among the parties stunning. Clearly David and Maggie are victims of their impulsiveness; it is that same impetuousness that causes them to pull apart in adversity rather than come together in solution.

In eloquent prose, the author casts his characters in the picturesque Nova Scotia, the honking swans, the distance between the lovers accented by the haunting rural landscape. Love being more powerful than enforced isolation, David and Maggie eventually navigate the rocky ground of their fledgling marriage, toward a resolution of differences and a strong dose of forgiveness. Luan Gaines/2007.

A Swan Dive
In previous Norman novels and reminiscences, I have enjoyed the richness of interesting, well-developed characters doing wild things carefully. I have loved the uncompromising spirit of the author, and have counted him on my wish list, eagerly awaiting his next journey into the vast inner spacings of eastern Canada. It is, therefore, very sad for me to say that I feel I have lost a friend. I think the author has disappeared with a flight of wounded swans.
Devotion appears written with little distance from the main character. It appears written in drunken haste, ill-timed, in often stiltifed and forced prose. Norman wanely develops his Dosteyevskian 'idiot', places him in the anguishing half-light of passive resistance, makes him a voyeur to all but the swam, only with whom he can frolic in drunken embrace. But who cares. Not Norman nor I.
Firstly, the timing is off. Norman has lost, in the irony of the title, any 'devotion' he has had for the painstaking craftsmanship of his earlier works. The author of 'Northern Lights' and, of course his famous trilogy of exceptional prose, seems to have been forced to try to re-create his masterpieces for expedience's sake and for, I suspect, a whole kettle of yankee dollars. The book just does not work.
Two dimensional characters passionlessly embrace even before they are introduced. Who are these people seen only in half-light. Norman thinks he is still in control of his craft but he now writes with a flat, false pen. There is no drama, no pacing that can make important sequences come alive. Maggie's naked dance by the window is dull because Maggie is dull as is the voyeur David who is dull. Finally they touch, appear re-united in the car. This act, in a drama of people who cannot cause an action, should mean something to us.But Maggie, or is it David, or perhaps, Howard Norman who makes us feel one or both or all of them are holding a dead mackerel in their flaccid fingers?
There is greater passion about the swans. Its obvious Norman has given up on human contact. The passing mention of a woman who believes her swan to be a dead husband is more in keeping with this author's present passion. The only real scene in this story that masquerades as substance(and I suspect, like his character,was written with alcohol very close by) occurs when David wrestles with the swan and falls down drunk amidst swan dew. It is as close to drunken passion that the present-day Norman can affect.
Sadly, Norman obviously no longer cares. He is Roger Clemens trying to scratch out one more season well after his skills are gone His gifts are wilted.
Devotion, above all else, is a very dull read. Not until page 70 of this short work do we begin to see any movement. The plot,an accident...a misunderstanding in a hotel room, a punch in the mouth? Wow,oh my, what heart-stopping drama!. Like David, his protagonist, Norman now is now disappeared behind the camera lense. His prose, like his protagonist's actions; indeed, like all his characters seems irksome and stilted--forced and banal.
I need more, Howard Norman, if I am to pay twenty dollars to read you again. Where's your.....honesty, your.....devotion?

Great for those who love this author
If you are a fan, do not hesitate, Norman's new book is beautifully written and very consistent with the unique point of view and perspective his narrators always provide. My only complaint is that it's a slim volume.