More lamenting than preventing: "The Ghost Birds" by Karen Russell

You know how sometimes, if someone talks up a movie like it's the greatest thing since Citizen Kane, they can end up creating such high expectations that you end up not liking a movie everyone else likes? That's always been Karen Russell for me. I've read Swamplandia! and a few of her short stories that have shown up in Best American Short Stories or Pushcart, and they've never really moved me that greatly. 

So maybe I'm actually doing a favor to the readers of BASS 2022 when I talk down Russell's "The Ghost Birds" a bit. It's possible I'll create such low expectations that readers will be pleasantly surprised, wondering what I was talking about. If that's you, you're welcome.

The shortcomings of the story are the same ones I see in a lot of sci-fi short fiction, especially the kind that occasionally shows up in BASS. There's a narrator at some point in humanity's future, and he's got this whole novel worth of world to build in a short space, so some of it gets crammed in there in sort of ham-fisted exposition. Here's such a passage in "The Ghost Birds"

Once the sky became deeded property, Surveillers started patrolling the hazy air above the lonely scrublands and evaporated lakes. Their employers are paranoid in proportion to the suffering that surrounds them; they seem to feel that anyone who casts a shadow in a Red Zone is an “ecoterrorist.” We joke that they must want to keep the escape routes to the moon clear....

My daughter mercifully missed the land grabs and the water wars fought above the rasping aquifers. The sky is what has been colonized in her lifetime—a private highway system branching out of Earth’s shallows into outer space, its imaginary lines conjured into legal reality and policed with blood-red force. A single human being now claims to own all the sky that lifts from the Andes to Mars.

When I read passages like this, where the narrator is more or less reciting fictional history in the middle of a narrative, I wonder who the narrator is telling this history to. In a novel, it might be possible to meet the Surveillers and get a sense of who they are and when they started doing what they do through interaction with them or through dialogue or through, I don't know, a character watching a holo-reel (in the parlance of the story) that tells them the past. In a short story, even a 7700-word short story like this one, there's not much room to do more than just blurt it all out. I know, because I've tried to write a futuristic short story, and it was very hard for me to come up with a better technique that wouldn't add way too much content.

It might be forgivable, except that so much of the world-building exposition of "The Ghost Birds" is not needed for the story. The Surveillers never show up. We never need to know about the colonization of space. There's something in there about selling your blood to the Surveillers, but it's never explained. I'm wondering if this story is part of a collection of connected short stories in which the Surveillers do matter. If so, that would help explain the seemingly needless digression of the narrator, but it doesn't make it a stronger story when it appears as a standalone in The New Yorker.

There are also occasional references to the "inner eye," the "dreaming eye," or the "conjuring eye," all of which play some unexplained role in viewing the ghosts of extinct birds.

Oh yeah, that's what the story's about. It took me a while to get there. Jasper is a ghost bird enthusiast taking his daughter Starling on a bird-watching expedition to the ruins of Chapman Elementary School near Portland, where in our current, non-fictional world, people gather every year to watch Vaux's swifts stop off in the chimney during their migration. Jasper hasn't told Starling's mother, from whom he is recently divorced, about this trip, because she'd never allow it.

Although all kinds of danger are teased, the only real danger they face--other than the every-day ecological threat of living in the year 2081--is the kind you'd get from any sort of excursion into unpopulated lands. They make a small mistake going through the school and get trapped, then Jasper slips while trying to climb the ladder out of the chimney. He's hurt, and they suddenly have to scramble to get help.

I'm kind of with Starling's mom on her reluctance to let Jasper take their 14-year-old daughter with him. Bringing her was a dumb thing to do, from what I can tell about the world. 

So why did he do it? And why is he interested in the ghost birds, anyway? Those are the real questions of the story. The answer to the latter question is that the ghost birds have something to teach us: "How to pierce the smoke wall of our dulled senses and lift into the unknown. How to navigate the world to come." Jasper is obsessed with this kind of quasi-mystical view of the ghosts birds, and I can't exactly blame his ex-wife for being skeptical about it. Jasper's belief in the ghost birds borders on credulity. At one point, his daughter asks if they might have missed the birds, and thinks to himself: "It was possible, of course. Backlit ghosts don’t show up in my scope, and the sunset had seemed to follow me and my spectrograph to every new angle. Could eleven thousand ghosts hide from us? What a silly question. How many billions are hiding from us now?"

I don't know, man. Like, zero billions? Ghosts aren't real. 

I'll stop being an asshole

Okay, I know that ghosts being real isn't the point. Ghosts are a symbol of something. Of what? Well, the answer to that is sort of the answer to the "Why did you bring your daughter out here?" question. When the trip goes wrong and Starling asks him this very thing, he doesn't say what he wants to say, which is, "You are growing up numb to the universe, numb even to your numbness. You don’t know the difference between a screen and a portal. Your eyes cannot distinguish between a digital hallucination and a real ghost. A critical window is closing, Starling. I am trying to hold it open for you, so that you can enter the night."

Ghost birds represent what actual birds do for us: the possibility of a different type of existence and a different meaning to existence. Hanging on to their ghosts, which is to say to their memory, is a way of keeping alive all the things birds meant to the world. It's "Ode to a Skylark" and "Ode to a Nightengale."

I've sometimes looked at stories before in terms of what their main function is. Is it to educate, to advocate, to entertain, to move, to illustrate? In this case, I think the main function of this story is to eulogize. It's not so much to try to convince us to save the world that is--the attitude of the story seems to be that this end is kind of inevitable--but to eulogize a world that will soon be no more, or at least that the story assumes will soon be no more. 

It's not without its emotional punch. When we finally get to the last scenes, and the money shot of the ghost birds flying up the chimney you knew was coming finally arrives, I felt something. It wasn't as strong as when I read Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence," which was also about an extinction of birds in the near future, nor as strong as reading Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut, which is written by the last human ghost in the future after humanity has evolved into a new species. There was something there, though. The story has its moments, and for what it is, it isn't bad. If only her stories would quit being hailed as these really breakthrough moments in American literature, I might even like them a little bit.