This past weekend I finished reading “The Book of Flying” by Keith Miller. This was part of a “book club” read with my brother-in-law David, his sister-in-law Karen, and his Mother.
From Amazon.Com and Booklist (written by Paula Luedtke), here is the book’s description:
Pico is the librarian in his city by the sea: a humble, gentle man, a collector of books, a guardian and caretaker of the stories that are his breath and his life. One fateful day, he falls in love with Sisi, a beautiful, winged girl who cannot truly love a wingless creature like him. So Pico sets off to find Morning Town, where legend says he will find the Book of Flying and get his wings. On the way he has fabulous adventures and meets astonishing people, each of whom provides a gateway to learning something important about himself. Perhaps his most important discovery is that he is the hero of his own story. A beautiful and haunting modern fable that reads like exquisite poetry, Miller’s first novel is a coming-of-age story cloaked in the language of myth in which Pico, as his humanity matures and expands to encompass those who are like and those who are unlike him, initially represents and eventually becomes the reader.
It is interesting that we picked this book. David was leading the charge. We wanted something that was fantasy, but nothing with out-right violence. His Mother is a big fan of Harry Potter and the like. From the description above, I expected something that might even be young adult friendly. As it turned out, though not described in great detail, one of the characters Pico meets is a cannibal, there’s a lot of cigarette smoking going on, and sex plays a big role in parts of the book. Not that these were problems for me. Just unexpected.
One thing that I liked and disliked at the same time was the many stories within the actual story. Many times when Pico would stop on his journey, he would tell a story to someone, or have a story told to him. Some of them were quite interesting, while others were just alright. For a while it seemed like Miller was trying to take all his short story ideas and make a novel out of them.
As is said in the description, Miller writes with beautiful prose. The book is totally filled with it, including many lines of actual poetry written by Pico. But at times this is the only redeeming quality of the book. There were parts of the book that seemed aimless to me. I wondered why Pico needed to meet a certain character, and didn’t see what he got out of them. And since it’s a bit of an adventure book, trying to reach his quest, it stalled in the middle as his quest stalled. He came to another city and literally hung out for six months.
Some of the characters he met were interesting, but I felt the most interesting ones weren’t developed enough, like Mister Rabbit (who can speak), and a painter by the name of Zarko.
So I finished the book with mixed feelings. Miller proved he is a wordsmith, but in my opinion needed to concentrate more on the story and character development.
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