Author and professor Lindsey Drager’s new novel, The Avian Hourglass, presents a deeply engaging journey through dreamlike terrain. It is intellectually even more challenging and weird than her excellent 2019 novel, The Archive of Alternate Endings.
In The Avian Hourglass, an unidentified narrator navigates a plethora of exceedingly strange circumstances in an unidentified town while studying for her fifth (and final) attempt to pass the test to become a radio astronomer. She discovers “Saturn”, the first in a series of half-buried cement blocks showing the carved names of all the nearby planets (except Earth) in properly spaced, distant orbits around the town’s sundial.
Her aunt, a fount of etymological knowledge, has filled her yard with defective versions of world globes that she, as did her forebears, fashions (and revises via pasted-on overlays showing variant versions of continents, borders, and languages) at the request of the town’s residents. The town is facing a Crisis (a ubiquitous reference in the narrative but never described). Its residents have regularly met, for over four decades, at the Demonstration, in two groups arguing “Yes” or “No” (and eventually “Maybe”), but the question at hand is never identified.
The narrator’s friend, Uri, who wears a pair of wings at all times, is writing a one-man play about Icarus, which, although he fails to fashion an ending, is regularly performed for the townsfolk.
In the aftermath of a solar eclipse, all birds have disappeared (although bird-less, human-sized nests mysteriously pop up all around town). The ghost of the missing birds plays an ever-present if low-key role throughout The Avian Hourglass, including “narrating” an important local folktale, “Girl in Glass Vessel”, which mirrors Drager’s narrative.
The birds are not the only things that have disappeared. Environmental degradation has generated a perpetual smog that obliterates the stars. A friend of the narrator has created “the star house”, a large wooden room constructed in a field, with holes in the roof designed to create a mid-day vision inside the black box replicating the lost starry sky.
However, The Avian Hourglass‘ gravamen is that while navigating these and many other odd circumstances, the narrator provides a continuous stream of consciousness; scientific, literary, and philosophical. She ruminates on fiction’s paradoxical function: “to illuminate a truth”, noting that “the ending must be inevitable but also surprising, so that it both fulfills … expectations and also subverts them.” While constituting something of a trope in creative writing circles, this insightful maxim will also be true of The Avian Hourglass‘ ending.
The narrator, in the face of Uri’s almost continuous and fraught play rehearsals, contemplates notions of the theater and personal identity. The actor knows what his or her next words will be and where on stage he or she will next move. However,
“the actor knows what is going to happen … but the character – the person the actor is playing – they don’t know what is coming … [the actor has] to abandon the you that is actor, give yourself over to the you that is character.”
As she is intent on becoming a radio astronomer, the narrator’s head is filled with thoughts of time and space. She notes that when we see distant celestial objects (or used to be able to see them), we look literally and directly into the past since light speed takes time. The Avian Hourglass has a many-layered theme of time, its loops, and its reversal, of tracing the present back into the past. One such layer pertains to etymology; she and her aunt repeatedly discuss the origin of words in the past (including the word “etymology”). There are many scenes involving the rewinding of tape recordings as well as stop-and-start play rehearsals in which time is said to be reversed to reach a different present.
And likewise for our real life in the world itself: “I am washing Uri’s wings…and I imagine then that this is all a rehearsal: a world in which I can press rewind and everything returns to some place before where it is now, and we … live it again.”
Drager’s narrator recounts the narrative arc in reverse in a passage toward the novel’s end. Looping and recursive time are portrayed in the town’s folktale, which ends at its beginning, as with this narrator’s tale, which is told in numbered sections that count down from 180 to 1 and then end with 180.
In fiction, weirdness can be intriguing, but it can also be a trap. Many strange tales are a muddle of time and space, braiding confusingly in a morass of oddity for its own sake. This is not the case with The Avian Hourglass. On the novel’s Acknowledgements page, Drager states that she hopes that her “next project won’t be so weird.” I do not share that hope. Drager is adept at creating worlds that differ deeply from ours yet are consistent and engaging, demonstrating her substantial literary talents.