'Dirty Birds' Serves a Delightfully Cynical Parody of Male Artistic Persona
Milton Ontario (not to be confused with Milton, Ontario the suburb) is a nobody from nowhere Saskatchewan who decides to become a poet like his hero, Leonard Cohen. Unfortunately, the poems Milton churns out on his grandmother’s forty-four-pound typewriter are nothing short of abysmal, but this doesn’t stop him from hopping a bus to Montréal to follow in Cohen’s footsteps—which means sleeping in a closet and living off day-old bagels with a crowd of hipster artist wannabes.
Dirty Birds is an absurd novel about absurd subcultures of artists, grad students, and adultescents that author Morgan Murray explores with both laugh-out-loud lunacy and scathing insight. Many of the novel’s premises require a fair suspension of disbelief: mutant super-bedbugs that cause gigantism of the penis, a used bookstore stocked entirely with stolen library books, and a call centre whose employee training program was inspired by Mussolini and Mao Zedong.
The characters Milton encounters consist of vivid caricatures, such as a roommate who eats grilled horsemeat and scrawls an S on his “Molson Ex” t-shirt, puppeteers who smoke meth in alleyways, and freegans who make soup out of literal garbage. Murray’s illustrations of consequential plot points further add to the fun, combining with the novel’s zany, episodic sections to create a comic-book-like feel.
Dirty Birds is also unabashedly Canadian in its geography, history, hockey vernacular, and cultural references ranging from Degrassi and The Racoons to the Tragically Hip and Great Big Sea. It opens with a condemningly witty account of Canadian colonial history from the time of the Hudson’s Bay Company—“The history of Canada would be a hilarious Monty Python sketch were it not underwritten by 400-and-some years’ (and counting) of passive-aggressive genocide”—and covers both the Quebec nationalist movement and the Newfoundland fishing moratorium that put thousands out of work in the 1990s.
Of particular Canadian flair is Murray’s rendering of provincial dialects ranging from Saskatchewan hockey-speak—“I did a few years in PA in the dub and then got dumped in the ay-jay”—to bilingual admonishing—“Putain, Milton, c’est la putain qui a brisé ton coeur? Is this her? Mon dieu, c’est elle!”—and Newfoundland townie—“ThenamesGerryb’yaftermefadderan’’isfatherbeforedat” that give each section a distinct feel.
Humour and cultural references aside, Dirty Birds offers a remarkably cynical take on the canonical male coming-of-age story, particularly those that spur Milton’s youthful thirst for adventure (his stack of classics includes The Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, and Tropic of Cancer). Milton spends most of the novel broke and miserable, while his infatuation with a Montréal filmmaker/love interest he barely knows is portrayed as pathetic, humiliating, and the prototypical male pursuit of women as objects. “The universe does not owe you anything,” Milton’s roommate tells him at his lowest point. “Especially a woman. We are not there to be won.”
In love, art, and career, Milton’s inability to make anything of himself forms a clear condemnation of the twentysomething hipsters who half-assedly pursue a vapid engagement with the arts, with some of Murray’s best passages examining the misspent youth of a generation that will eventually grow up, move to the suburbs with mediocre jobs, and pop out their 1.8 kids.
While the complete lack of growth in Milton’s character in later chapters will ultimately leave readers feeling unfulfilled and unable to empathize with his plight, Murray’s ruthless mocking of the post-modern male Bildungsroman suggests that these staples of the twentieth-century canon aren’t as effective as they may have been once-upon-a-time, and that new takes on these stories are necessary if they’re to be told at all.
In this respect, Murray juxtaposes the social injustices of Canada’s history against Milton’s significantly less momentous struggles, placing them in clearer context: dragging an eighty-pound duct-taped bag to the site-unseen Montréal hovel you found on Craigslist may be excruciating in the moment, but it’s small potatoes compared to the more substantial hardships faced by others. “You think poet is a job,” Milton’s roommate chastises him, “and the worst thing that ever happened to you was you stubbed your toe or some shit. . . Ya can’t fathom misery at that scale.”
By acknowledging these greater hardships directly, Murray suggests that clarifying one’s relative privilege against the sufferings of others is key to granting less significant struggles a place in a changing literary world. Only then, when readers are all on the same page about what’s most important, can we sit back and enjoy a novel full of gunfights and sex jokes.
Thank you to Breakwater Books for providing Shrapnel with a media copy of Dirty Birds.
Dirty Birds is available now for purchase at Breakwater Books’ website and in bookstores across Canada.
Price: $22.95 CAD
ISBN: 9781550818079
Pages: 432
Genre: Fiction
Pub date: August 7, 2020
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Book Review
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January 18,
2021
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5 MINUTE
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Ian Rogers
is originally from New Hampshire, USA, and lives and works in Toyama, Japan. His short fiction chapbook "Eikaiwa Bums" was published through Blue Cubicle Press's Overtime series, and his other short fiction and essays have appeared in The Millions, Eastlit, The Drunken Odyssey, Four Ties Literary Review, and elsewhere. He blogs about balancing creative work with keeping the bills paid at butialsohaveadayjob.com.