Museum Guard

After finishing this wonderful novel, I felt like I had "discovered" a new author. Actually, Howard Norman has been writing since the early 1980s and published his first novel, The Northern Lights, in the late 80s. I was drawn to this book by its title (I work in a museum) but fell in love with it for its quirky characters. It seems that Norman's characters are often forged by tragedy. The parents of DeFoe, the young museum guard, were killed in a Zeppelin accident when he was a boy. He develops a close relationship with his often-drunk uncle Edward, but even closer ones with many of the women that pass through Edward's life, including Imogen, the caretaker of a Jewish cemetary, whom DeFoe and Edward both pursue, though in radically different ways. Be warned, there may be a moment in this novel when you will detest all three of these characters; but forge ahead, because at least two of them will redeem themselves. Don't think of this as just another novel with "quirky" characters. They certainly are quirky, but in ways that make them real rather than caricatures. I was left feeling somewhat troubled about Imogen and the reasons for her crisis, which drives the latter part of the book, and the determination of the people around her to sacrifice everything for her, but that is only a minor complaint. Above all, this is a coming of age story, mainly for DeFoe, who is a product of arrested development due to his parents' untimely deaths, but also for Edward, Imogen, and even--you will see--for the world.

I enjoyed "The Bird Artist" by this author very much, so I wanted to read other books he had written. This one is a very well written, short work, but it tells a compelling story about the many types of obsession that exist in life. The prose is spare, but beautiful, and the tale moves along fairly swiftly to its bittersweet and somewhat mysterious and enigmatic ending. You're caught up in the lives of the various characters, particularly the unusual young woman who changes herself into the embodiment of a figure in a Dutch painting. Along with the title character, you can tell that it's going to end up badly for her, but like him, you realize that, ultimately, there is nothing that can be done. The book may be a little depressing, but that's the story it tells, and it's one that is well worth reading, if you like good writing.

After reading Norman's The Bird Artist, I was amazed, yet doubtful he could repeat the brilliance. Well, in the Museum Guard, he does. It takes seemingly unconnected bits of history, art, and plot and blends them togethor to form one of the most memorable books I've read in a long time. His genius takes the trials of everday people and makes the reader interested, if not obsessed with the strange twists and turns this imaginative, original plot takes. Don't read this book if you seek a story about right and wrong, a bad guy and a good guy. Norman is too brilliant to write a story like that.

I have read all of Howard Norman's books and this is definitely the best. The characters are quirky and interesting. The plot is original and thought-provoking. Anyone who has read Norman before and enjoyed him should like this book. It is faster paced and has many more twists and turns than the others.

Howard Norman's The Museum Guard tells the relationship between DeFoe, a young museum guard in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Imogen, keeper of the Jewish cemetery who first becomes enraptured by and then literally becomes Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam, the subject of a painting on exhibit. As with Norman's earlier The Bird Artist, this is very much a novel of place and character. Particular to this novel, however, is its setting in history - 1938, a time of Nazi fanaticism and anti-Semitism. It is this context which makes Imogen's "madness" particularly horrifying, because in "becoming" the Jewess in the painting she travels to Amsterdam when Nazi overrun appeared imminent. Norman manages to write a novel that is both shocking and humorous, wise and witty. His use of language, also, is a marvel.