Pros and Cons of Impossible Owls

Impossible Owls, a collection of eight essays by Brian Phillips, is full of surprise topics and random meditations. This is both a strength and a weakness, at least in my experience. It's the perfect Kindle volume for shutting down at night, taking me all over the world in vivid journeys, but with complex sentences and meditative sidebars that do not block slumber.

Strengths:

1. The guy has mastered the English language. A couple of his lines are the most delightful I've ever read. Here's a sample:

[T]here's something magical to me . . . about a place that can inhale a clutch of Victorian sailing ships and leave behind a handful of brass buttons and a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield.

2. In every new essay, you find yourself planted in a whole new setting, out of your element and having to rely on this voluble author to figure things out as you go. In the first essay I was in Alaska, following the Iditarod in a claustrophobic plane, the personable pilot warning about plane crashes and punctuating his stories with, "BY THE WAY . . ." (I Googled this pilot, who was indeed killed by a plane--but on the ground--sometime after the book was published.) Then I'm in Japan watching sumo wrestlers while Phillips gives a tour of the sport, wanders the city, and finds himself a mission: tracking down a man who played a grisly part in an attempted military takeover years ago. Next up: Area 51. And so on.

3. At every turn, you bump up against serendipitous topics. When I happily found myself in a Jeep spotting tigers in Indian jungles, the author's reflections took unexpected directions. In another chapter's mildly amusing discussion of watching a movie while high on Vicodin, he suddenly starts talking about Star Trek, and reflects on watching all available episodes of TNG:

Captain Kirk’s Enterprise was a ship of phaser-happy explorers forever pressing onward toward the next fistfight on the next undiscovered planet; in comparison, Captain Picard’s Enterprise is a calm, sleek vessel of end-of-history galactic administration–a faster-than-light embassy, complete with chamber-music concerts. There’s very little fighting; there’s a great deal of personal growth and a staggering amount of trade-pact negotiation.

Then he goes on to dissect The X-Files and talk about its presence in his teen years, even when he wasn't watching it.

4. In this book, I've stumbled on new territory, unexpected corners of information. For instance, the beautiful tigers in India, the ones that wealthy conservationists in other lands want to preserve for the next generation to enjoy, have taken thousands of lives over decades. Villagers minding their own business get hauled away as a meal for the stealthy creature. India has better safeguards now than in the past, but tigers eat livestock and are still a problem. In the early 1900s, tiger hunter Jim Corbett tracked down and killed prolific maneaters, publishing Maneaters of Kumaon in 1944. Phillips takes us through one of these chilling stories, where night was falling in the dim jungle and the hunter could hear the animal, but not see it.

5. Phillips doesn't give us an instant take on a subject regardless of its political connotations, but ruminates on different factors. In the case of tiger conservation, he can truly see the villagers' point of view. As for whether Corbett is a hero--well, so Phillip's thinking goes, Corbett praised the British Empire, which indirectly caused the uptick in tiger violence by clearing forests, so Corbett was promoting the very source of the problem he was helping to quell.

Cons

1. Either I'm not grasping this writer's structure, or he does not prioritize ordering his ideas. His essays can lack some of the traditional markers that help us navigate the content, especially the sudden gear switches. The explorations can feel random--like an abstract art collage with glimpses of realism. I can't figure out whether his style is due to an artistic bent, or we're getting something not too many generations down from the first draft, or if, in reality, he's crafted a meticulous outline.

I ordinarily can't put up with lyrical patchwork writing--it's a chore to read and inscrutable to all but the initiated few. In one of his tightest essays, the author launches with a close-up, controlled writing style, following a famous Russian animator who has spent decades on his adaptation of Gogol's "The Overcoat." Still, Phillips jars us with his leaps in time and place, where he goes from the author's earlier experiences under the Soviets to the current timeline. I suppose we call this writing style "stream of consciousness." If so, Phillip's cascading thoughts can make a grand spectacle.

2. The author's thoughts often flow into complex, inaccessible asides on the higher meanings of ordinary things. However, I stick with it because they don't come across as if he's just trying to sound profound--he's got the writing chops to keep his credibility while delivering the deep thought for the day. Even Star Trek: The Next Generation was, for him, a commentary on the ethos of the '90s. His trip to Roswell and then Area 51 in "Lost Highway" had him ruminating on Route 66.

3. He gets a hair's breadth from bad writing when he's in full artistic mode, throwing out bad similes and skipping around. "Once and Future Queen" is almost a mess, starting with Queen Elizabeth, going to Charles and Prince Philip, and then onto Diana and Princess Kate. He's a mind reader, a scrivener whose flowery assumptions about character might also come from an amassment of research that verifies his narrative. On Philip:

So often the royal couple's duty is to make others feel important. Easy enough when your importance has never been in doubt. But he has been homeless in the finest castles in Europe; he has nurtured the small flame of his own prestige through terrible nights. The map he read by it never showed him these decades of vague, agreeable service. It helps, of course, to know he is doing his duty. But duty, around the small grain of his mortification, is a pearl that never quite closes. Give him the playing field, the decks of his old ships: places where he could trust reason and ruthlessness and where--quasi-orphan that he was--he knew whom he needed to impress.

And the owls? Owls whoosh in and out of the peripheries of his stories. They're never the main character, and their presence is uncanny. I only remembered one appearance of the bird, but a search reminded me of several dozen mentions. Perhaps the owl was his muse, as mysterious and elusive as the author's own flights of profundity.