If this particular fictional take on his life is to be believed, he was self-obsessed, narcissistic, using, callous, cheating, with little care for others other than himself, except when he feels like it. I don't know about you, but the idea of spending as much time as a three hundred page book with this jerk doesn't sound so interesting.
Yet...I'm not entirely sure that the author thinks he's as much of a colossal asshat as I did. And I only had her words to go on! Add to that the fact that I found much of this book severely overwritten, with a narrator that was partially from our time, but not overtly, and I was frustrated by this entry on the 100 Novels to Make You Proud to Be Canadian list from the CBC. I wasn't really sure how it would make me proud to be Canadian either, because I'm not sure any of main the characters are Canadian, although it took place on the shores of Labrador. But the locals mostly came across as rapacious in their plunder of the natural world around them.
(I'm being unreasonably nitpicky - I just haven't been overly impressed with that list overall. It is far too heavily weighted towards books that came out less than five years before the list was published, and there are a bunch of them I either have been ambivalent towards or have outright hated, so far. I keep wondering if I should give this list up, but then I wouldn't have anything specifically Canadian I was drawing from when I picked books.)
Back to Audubon. He lies all the time. He frequently puts his son who is travelling with him in mortal peril because he needs the birds - he is then tortured about it, right up until he spots another bird he could try to kill his son in pursuit of. He feels vaguely bad about having asked his other son to give up his life to serve his father's obsession, but not bad enough to do anything about it. Similarly, he feels vaguely bad about having left his wife without financial resources most of her life, while also cheating on her non-stop, but again...not enough to do anything about it. He gets unreasonably angry when the woman he wants as a mistress wants anything of her own, for instance, drawing things that aren't lessons he set for her. He doesn't feel bad about that. Just possessive, and for possessive read, wants complete ownership of a woman he is attracted to.
I mean, ugh. I almost put this book down and didn't finish it numerous times. I don't really care about the greatness of his mission. I'm sure he did good work, but it sounds like he was such a loathsome human being that I really don't give that much of a shit. (Or maybe he wasn't, or maybe the author didn't mean to make him so damn unlikeable, but wow, did I hate him.)
Yes, we have despoiled the natural world. Yes, it's good that we have drawings of birds before they disappeared. It's good he was concerned about species going extinct (I'm being charitable in assuming that is not ahistorical). But you know, like everything else...he feels vaguely bad about it, but isn't willing to do anything to address it that isn't really for his own greater glory.
I'm not a fan of this book. Of the character, of the writing, of the positioning of the author in the narrative in a way that doesn't commit enough if she really wants to insert herself. Go whole hog or not at all, please.
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