Book Review: The Plover

This is not a book for everyone.
Oceans of words, swelling waves of paragraphs, long sinuous sentences running on for a page or more like a rare variety of seaweed.
And a compelling story as well.
Author Brian Doyle, best known as the editor of “Portland” magazine and books of essays, has written two novels.  The first, “Mink River,” is invariably described as a “sprawling” novel of Oregon.  And now, “The Plover” – not really a sequel but more a companion piece – about Irish Oregonian Declan O’Donnell, a minor character in “Mink River.”
Declan jerry rigs a fishing trawler, named Plover after the plucky shore bird.  Tired of other people and their problems, he sets off due west along the 45th parallel, this only companion a copy of the collected works of Edmund Burke.
His carefully constructed solitude gradually erodes.  First a seagull, next an old fishing buddy, recently widowed and with tiny disabled daughter in tow.  Then a monumental Island woman, who everyone thought was a man.  Then a visionary politician.  Then mice, birds, and barnacles.
It’s an exciting, gusty tale of ocean storms and being hunted by the obsessed captain of a rogue Russian trawler.  It’s a quiet story, as each passenger on the Plover is distilled and transformed.  It’s hilarious, and mysterious, sometimes frightening, and deeply moving.
My copy has scores of post-its marking favorite passages.  Here’s one, talking about our legacy to our children and grandchildren.  “We cannot leave them with slices of land, as we do not actually own the land, and we cannot leave them money, as we do not generally have money, but we can leave them charts for living, in a manner of speaking.  We can leave them good stories like compasses that point toward true things.”