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readallthenewberys2013-02-19 03:36 pm
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2013-02-19 03:36 pm
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Newbery Medal: Gay-Neck, The Story of a Pigeon (Dhan Gopal Mukerji)
There are such a lot of books I never heard of on this list...
* The illustrations are by Boris Artzybasheff, so those should be interesting, anyway.
* The dedication doesn't make the book sound terribly fascinating - it's most of a page, talking about how the Indian poet to whom the book is dedicated (one Suresh Chandra Banerji) will "protect the book from being condemned" and how "For a pigeon, life is a repetition of two incidents: namely, quest of food and avoidance of attacks by its enemies". The author notes that his sources are "too numerous to be mentioned here", so at least it's likely to be realistic? WE SHALL SEE. :D
* Apparently this book is a sequel to Kari the Elephant by the same author, a book I have not read; the same first-person narrator appears in both. This narrator seems to be a fictionalized version of the author.
* The title pigeon's name is "Chitra-Griva", chitra being translated as "painted in gay colors" and griva as "neck", with "Iridescence-throated" given as an alternate translation. However, "Gay-Neck" seems to be the name that will be used for most of the book.
* Gay-Neck is going to "prove himself... a worthy carrier pigeon in war", later in the book; World War I, or a war in India? I don't know.
* Gay-Neck is the only child of his family, as the other egg of the clutch was broken when the narrator, attacked by the father pigeon while cleaning the nest-box, dropped it.
* The narrator keeps interjecting his present adult self with lines like "To me that is as good as a miracle", which (as I have learned SO MANY TIMES) was conventional in the 1920s but can still get really tiring really fast. Let's hope he doesn't.
* A quick summary: Chapter 1 covered the hatching of Gay-Neck.
* This book is so far about half information on how to raise pigeons, told directly to the reader by the narratorial voice, and half the very slow-moving story of Gay-Neck. Apparently pigeon-raising is or was a very common practice among young boys in India.
* In chapter 2, Gay-Neck learns to fly. The pacing of this book is rather similar to that of Smoky the Cow Horse, but it's a bit less interesting to me - I'm not sure why.
* In chapter 3, Gay-Neck escapes his first hawk (with his parents' help), begins learning to "home" (also with his parents' help), and is caught in a monsoon which kills his father, but Gay-Neck and his mother come home safe.
* The author tells us about the town of Darjeeling in the Himalayan foothills, where he and his family and also Gay-Neck go to vacation for the summer monsoon. He throws in a quick mention of one of his other books, Ghond the Hunter, which also takes place in this 'verse, then goes back to the training of Gay-Neck.
* ...oh right, neither Mount Everest nor Kanchenjunga had yet been climbed when this book was written! O_O *checks* Ooh, Mount Everest was only climbed in 1953, and Kanchenjunga in 1955 (and Kanchenjunga's summit is still left untouched by most climbers, out of respect for those locals who revere it as a sacred spot). Mukerji throws in a paragraph about his prayer that no human being would ever tread those highest peaks; it strikes me that there's a divide so deep I can't even start to understand it between the two mindsets "this is the highest mountain I've ever seen, I won't go up there because RESPECT" and "this is the highest mountain I've ever seen, I will get to the top or die trying". Yet they're both mindsets that many, many people have. I don't know where I'm going with that, it's just interesting.
(Dhan Gopal Mukerji did not live to see Everest or Kanchenjunga climbed. Sadly, he committed suicide in 1936 after spending most of his adult life exiled from India for his anti-colonialist views.)
* This whole chapter is so very loosely strung on the thread of Gay-Neck's story that it's hard to track, but there is an eagle's nest, and some lovely descriptions of the north Indian jungle, and then another attack by a hawk, in which Gay-Neck's mother dies. The young narrator-character goes with his friend Radja and their hunter-mentor Ghond to look for Gay-Neck, who has fallen onto a cliff ledge from fright.
* Gay-Neck has fallen near the eagle's nest. The three climb up to try and catch him, but he is scared by various things and flies away. Ghond says he will come back in a day or two and they should wait for him.
* Detailed and artistic description of a night in the open in the Himalaya mountains. Radja, a trained Brahminic priest at age sixteen, chants a morning hymn to the sun.
* The mother eagle has left the nest for good; apparently the three humans have arrived just in time to see the eaglets learning to fly, which they do by being abandoned once they are full-fledged and having to hunt for themselves or starve. The eaglets walk up the mountain, then one knocks the other off a narrow ledge by accident, and they both begin to fly.
* The three humans leave that place and go to start checking all the pigeon-lofts Gay-Neck has ever seen and might have remembered, in order to find him. Their departure ends chapter 4.
* They stay overnight at a Buddhist lamasery where one of the lamas tells them Gay-Neck sheltered the night before, and was fed and "healed of his fear" before leaving. Reassured, they continue trekking down-mountain.
* More long and luxuriant descriptions of the native wildlife, including a rather interesting if slow passage about pheasants and camouflage. Then the three travellers reach another house, belonging to a friend's father, where Gay-Neck has rested and eaten before leaving again. They stay there that night. The next night they sleep in a banyan tree in the jungle, where Ghond is nearly eaten by a tiger before reaching safety - and yet the story is completely without suspense. O_O I think a lot of why this story seems a bit less interesting than others I've read is simply that it's written by someone with a different idea of narrative structure than I'm used to. *curious face*
* Different narrative structure or no, this is a very slow book. I'm on page 61 of 191 and already getting bogged down. That's... thirty-two percent, not even a third of the way. :-(
* The travellers are frightened by a temperamental elephant feeding in the trees around them, but when it reaches its trunk up into their tree and smells them, instead of attacking it is frightened, and when the hunter Ghond accidentally sneezes in its trunk, it runs away in a panic. After waiting for the jungle to calm down again, they continue their journey, and eventually reach home, where Gay-Neck is safe and sound in their pigeon-loft. Thus ends Chapter 5.
* Chapter 6, only a few pages long, tells of how Gay-Neck flies away again the next day, stays gone for several days, and eventually the narrator-boy and Ghond hire ponies to go track him down. They get as far as being reassured by various people that Gay-Neck is alive and well, also there is more description of mornings and evening and wild geese, then the chapter ends.
* I took a break there and happened across Famous First Sentences on Tumblr, which caused me to wonder what the first sentence of this book is. (I never notice them on my own; I know "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" and "It is a truth universally acknowledged etc", and that's it.) It is "The city of Calcutta, which boasts of a million people, must have at least two million pigeons." Now you know. :D
* ...apparently they spent ten days looking for Gay-Neck, and now we are going to have at least one chapter NARRATED BY Gay-Neck telling what happened from his own point of view. Okaaaay then.
* Gay-Neck says that when his mom was killed by the hawk, he decided to kill himself by having the eagles eat him, only they wouldn't? So he flew away home, and on the way he had a fight with a hawk, and defeated it by accident when a downdraft dropped him on its head, and then he felt better and decided not to try to die after all.
* And then as soon as he saw that the boy-narrator was home and knew he was safe, he decided he had to fly ALL THE PLACES and "test [his] courage". So he went and flew back to the eagles' abandoned eyrie and poked around it, though he didn't sleep there for fear of vermin. Once the predator birds decided he was a strange sort of small eagle due to his hanging round there and started to give him a wide berth, he flew up and joined a wedge of geese flying south. After leaving the geese, he went back to the lamasery. This ends Chapter 7.
* ...and now Gay-Neck is going to give us a secondhand account of how swifts build their nests, as there were swifts at the lamasery near whom he nested. WHY DO I CARE. *sigh*
* "Among the swifts, women are not so emancipated as among the pigeons," says Gay-Neck. Apparently male swifts do not sit on the eggs, while pigeons do? Wiki is unclear, saying of swifts that "both parents assist in raising the young", and of pigeons that "both parents care for the young". Huh. Maybe the author is mistaken, or maybe there's a particular species of Indian swift that differs from the norm, or maybe the author just wanted to throw in a random reference to women's emancipation for some reason. I'm beginning to think you just never know with this writer. O_O
* Gay-Neck starts to fly south with the swifts, who are heading all the way to Sri Lanka or Africa. There is an incident where Gay-Neck fights a small sparrow-hawk to protect his friends. I'm wondering now whether it is normal for pigeons to actually fight hawks at all, or whether this is made up to show the pigeon in a heroic light, but I can't think what I'd google to find out, and I really don't want to spend much extra time reading about the habits of pigeons! ;P
* They meet ducks, who warn them about owls, and Gay-Neck spends a long and detailed night being scared of owls and then getting away from owls. Then they fly off by a roundabout route, not one of the major migration paths, so as to avoid the predators that haunt those major paths.
* They see fishing-ducks, and a thrush cracking a snail open, and men trapping peacocks by showing them a cloth painted like a tiger skin... and then Gay-Neck leaves the swifts to their migration, goes home again, and is purported to ask his master - because all this has been narrated by him in the format of a spoken story - "Why is there so much killing and inflicting of pain by birds and beasts on one another? I don't think all of you men hurt each other. Do you? But birds and beasts do. All that makes me so sad." End chapter. OH WRITER. Way to knock your readers over the head with a very thick moral. ;P
* That was the end of Part One! FIFTY-ONE PERCENT. :D
* The first chapter of Part Two is called "Gay-Neck's Training for War", so that explains the sudden OH HAI MORALIZING about violence. An attempt at Foreshadowing! :-)
* Okay, "a coming war somewhere in Europe", so World War I. The author would have been in his twenties when WWI started, but the boy-narrator is still young enough to be living with his mother and to get a scolding for staying out late.
* The narrator buys about forty more carrier pigeons and some "tumblers" (I don't know what breed that is), to train them all plus Gay-Neck for war work, in case the British War Service decides to call them up. He ties their wing-feathers together in a certain way, which works like hobbling a horse to keep them from flying until they learn to accept their new home, and not run back to their old owner who can legally keep them if they do so.
* The narrator also sells Gay-Neck, around this time, just to see if Gay-Neck will run back to him even after the two-week acclimation period. But within two days Gay-Neck has run from the new owner and disappeared. The narrator spends all afternoon looking for him without success, but the next day Gay-Neck turns up perfectly healthy.
* And now Gay-Neck is going to narrate how he did THAT.
* Gay-Neck badmouths his buyer, claiming he was given grain and water of bad quality, and that his wings were tied up with fishy-smelling string - this last, at least, there seems to be some evidence for, since Gay-Neck's wings are stated to smell of fish when he returns to the narrator.
* So anyway, Gay-Neck ran away, but a cat chased him, and he sort of jumped away from the cat, and happened to untie his wings from the string while rubbing them with his beak because they hurt, and oh-so-luckily the cat happened to be chasing the fishy-smelling string, and not the yummy pigeon at all! So Gay-Neck came home safe, and the narrator's father makes him repay the buyer's money to him even though that is not the custom. One wonders how much of that was the editor's idea.
* The chapter concludes with a description of how the narrator trained his new pigeons to have a snack of millet seeds soaked in liquid butter, every day at five, and when the time came for him to remove the hobbles from their wings, he did it a few minutes before five, so that after they flew around and stretched a bit, they came right back to him for their snack. Which is a very interesting little passage! But it could have done quite well without the sudden "alas! I have noticed that there are many men and women who resemble pigeons in this respect!" Perhaps the author thinks all his stories need morals?
* In the next chapter, Gay-Neck and two of the new pigeons fight for leadership of the pigeon flock. Gay-Neck wins, of course. Then they begin training for the pigeon competitions: flock teamwork, long-distance flight, and flight under danger.
* The teamwork competition is one where all the flocks of all the competitors are let loose, and fly so high they cannot hear their masters, and then whichever pigeon they all fall in behind is the winner. Gay-Neck wins this competition, of course, and stays in the lead of the flock all the time they are high in the sky.
* But on the way down, after all the other flocks have gone home and Gay-Neck's flock (which stayed up in the sky as a rearguard, because apparently pigeons do this) is coming home, a pair of buzzards try to attack the flock. Their technique is to drop down in front of the leader and open their wings suddenly, trying to startle the pigeons into scattering, because they refuse to attack a solid block of flying birds. But Gay-Neck is - pardon my pun - unflappable, and flies directly under both buzzards (each in turn), and holds the flock together. But the buzzards keep attacking, and scatter the flock about, while Gay-Neck tries to rally them, till eventually all but Gay-Neck and one of the new boss pigeons, Jahore, are home safe; the buzzards capture Gay-Neck and Jahore, one each, but Jahore's wriggling causes that buzzard to bump into the other one, who drops Gay-Neck safe and only slightly damaged on the roof. But Jahore gets eaten (offscreen).
* So now Gay-Neck refuses to fly, and after all his wounds are healed, the narrator is forced to conclude (not in these words) that he suffers from bird!PTSD and is afraid to go up in the air where anything can try to eat him again. And the narrator can't get him to fly very high. So the flock doesn't compete in the other two pigeon competitions.
* But Gay-Neck seems to be taking a fancy to the "widow" of Jahore, the pigeon who died, so the narrator thinks that maybe getting them to mate and raise a family will get Gay-Neck over his fear of flying and "Mrs Jahore" over her grieving for Jahore. So he packs them up in a cage and takes them to visit his friend Radja, who lives on the edge of the jungle as priest of the village Ghatsila. And to be brief, it all works out exactly as planned.
* Yup, the author is putting a moral at the end of each incident. "[A]lmost all our troubles come from fear, worry, and hate. If any man catches one of the three, the other two are added unto it." It's kind of an interesting style, really? I begin to like it.
* Also I am 68% done with this book. I like THAT, too. *g*
* Gay-Neck and the other new boss pigeon, Hira, and the hunter Ghond all go to Flanders where the Indian Army is, the two pigeons to carry messages and Ghond to be the familiar person who marks the "home" the pigeons return to, at headquarters. The narrator-boy cannot go because he's underage.
* Oh dear, and now Gay-Neck is going to tell us all about the war in his pigeon-ish dialect, which is a little bit like Up Goer Five language only now with more pointedly moralistic Not Getting Why Humans Are So Awful To Each Other! ;P ...here, have an Up Goer Five text editor. I will share. It makes me feel better. *g*
* So Gay-Neck tells us all about the "metal dogs that bark and spit fire" and "mechanical eagles" that swallow men and spit them out again alive, and... uh, how gorgeous the sound of a bomber's engine was? "Hardly had the ineffable glory of that supernal music overhead seized my soul" when the bombs start falling and people die... WHAT AM I READING. Anyway, Gay-Neck carries a message to the Commander-in-Chief of the army, "who looked like a ripe cherry and exuded a pleasant odour of soap", and he gets a pat on the head.
* Next chapter, Hira the other pigeon gets killed by a stray shot, but Gay-Neck gets through and carries a very important message saying that a division is cut off by the Germans and needs reinforcements. This chapter ends with a very dramatic illustration by Boris Artzybasheff, of Death with his scythe flying on the wings of the wind.
* In the next chapter - Chapter 6 of Part 2, and we are now 77% of the way done - we return to a narrator who knows place-names and speaks plain English, thank goodness! Apparently they're near Ypres and Armentieres.
* Ghond the hunter goes to scout an ammo dump behind enemy lines and return a map of the area via Gay-Neck. It is night. Ghond befriends a stray dog whose master has died, and makes it lead him straight to the munitions depot, which is also the German food-supply store. Then Ghond draws his map and sends it off, and the dog hauls him down under some thorn-bushes to hide in a frozen-over well. They hide there, but they're too close to the munitions dump, and they die when the Allied bombers blow it up.
* Now Gay-Neck is going to tell us about carrying the map to headquarters.
* Which he does. But one leg and one wing are broken by the sharpshooters and planes trying to shoot him down, and he loses part of his tail, and also he is again scared of flying.
* Ah, Ghond isn't dead after all. He's in the hospital, where they bring Gay-Neck once he's recovered, to visit him.
* And... now Ghond and Gay-Neck are suddenly back home in India, where Ghond explains basically what I already summed up. Okay, and Ghond is leaving for the lamasery previously introduced, but "before I recount his adventure there, I must tell the reader how Ghond happened to be transferred from the battlefields of France to our home". Yyyeah, you do that, fictionalized narrator boy.
* Okay, so the army just invalided both Ghond and Gay-Neck home, and Ghond went to the lamasery straight away, then later after confirming that Gay-Neck is refusing to fly again, the boy narrator brings Gay-Neck to the lamasery to join him.
* The trip there and the arrival is a whole lot more description. Come on, book, finish up already; is anything more actually going to happen in the last 15% or so?
* Mostly it's about how the kid meditates on peace and freedom from fear, for days on end, until somehow his lack of fear... is transferred into the pigeon? I don't know. The author seems to take it seriously, that's all I can say.
* Then near the very end of the book, the hunter Ghond, who has also been meditating on freedom from fear, is sent by the abbot of the lamasery to make a wild buffalo that has killed two people from the nearby village stop pestering the village. There is even more description while they waaaaaait for the buffalo. ;-)
* Finally, the buffalo shows up. They try to capture him alive, but don't quite succeed, and Ghond kills him with a dagger. In the scuffle Gay-Neck, who was up a tree with the narrator kid, flies away and disappears.
* They go back to the kid's parents' country home in the foothills, and Gay-Neck has arrived before them. Now everybody is happy, and at the end of the book, "instead of spinning out a sermon" *OH LOL SIR*, the author gives us a nice little paragraph on how we ought never to fear or hate, but live full of courage and love and peace like a flower is full of fragrance, the end.
* The illustrations are by Boris Artzybasheff, so those should be interesting, anyway.
* The dedication doesn't make the book sound terribly fascinating - it's most of a page, talking about how the Indian poet to whom the book is dedicated (one Suresh Chandra Banerji) will "protect the book from being condemned" and how "For a pigeon, life is a repetition of two incidents: namely, quest of food and avoidance of attacks by its enemies". The author notes that his sources are "too numerous to be mentioned here", so at least it's likely to be realistic? WE SHALL SEE. :D
* Apparently this book is a sequel to Kari the Elephant by the same author, a book I have not read; the same first-person narrator appears in both. This narrator seems to be a fictionalized version of the author.
* The title pigeon's name is "Chitra-Griva", chitra being translated as "painted in gay colors" and griva as "neck", with "Iridescence-throated" given as an alternate translation. However, "Gay-Neck" seems to be the name that will be used for most of the book.
* Gay-Neck is going to "prove himself... a worthy carrier pigeon in war", later in the book; World War I, or a war in India? I don't know.
* Gay-Neck is the only child of his family, as the other egg of the clutch was broken when the narrator, attacked by the father pigeon while cleaning the nest-box, dropped it.
* The narrator keeps interjecting his present adult self with lines like "To me that is as good as a miracle", which (as I have learned SO MANY TIMES) was conventional in the 1920s but can still get really tiring really fast. Let's hope he doesn't.
* A quick summary: Chapter 1 covered the hatching of Gay-Neck.
* This book is so far about half information on how to raise pigeons, told directly to the reader by the narratorial voice, and half the very slow-moving story of Gay-Neck. Apparently pigeon-raising is or was a very common practice among young boys in India.
* In chapter 2, Gay-Neck learns to fly. The pacing of this book is rather similar to that of Smoky the Cow Horse, but it's a bit less interesting to me - I'm not sure why.
* In chapter 3, Gay-Neck escapes his first hawk (with his parents' help), begins learning to "home" (also with his parents' help), and is caught in a monsoon which kills his father, but Gay-Neck and his mother come home safe.
* The author tells us about the town of Darjeeling in the Himalayan foothills, where he and his family and also Gay-Neck go to vacation for the summer monsoon. He throws in a quick mention of one of his other books, Ghond the Hunter, which also takes place in this 'verse, then goes back to the training of Gay-Neck.
* ...oh right, neither Mount Everest nor Kanchenjunga had yet been climbed when this book was written! O_O *checks* Ooh, Mount Everest was only climbed in 1953, and Kanchenjunga in 1955 (and Kanchenjunga's summit is still left untouched by most climbers, out of respect for those locals who revere it as a sacred spot). Mukerji throws in a paragraph about his prayer that no human being would ever tread those highest peaks; it strikes me that there's a divide so deep I can't even start to understand it between the two mindsets "this is the highest mountain I've ever seen, I won't go up there because RESPECT" and "this is the highest mountain I've ever seen, I will get to the top or die trying". Yet they're both mindsets that many, many people have. I don't know where I'm going with that, it's just interesting.
(Dhan Gopal Mukerji did not live to see Everest or Kanchenjunga climbed. Sadly, he committed suicide in 1936 after spending most of his adult life exiled from India for his anti-colonialist views.)
* This whole chapter is so very loosely strung on the thread of Gay-Neck's story that it's hard to track, but there is an eagle's nest, and some lovely descriptions of the north Indian jungle, and then another attack by a hawk, in which Gay-Neck's mother dies. The young narrator-character goes with his friend Radja and their hunter-mentor Ghond to look for Gay-Neck, who has fallen onto a cliff ledge from fright.
* Gay-Neck has fallen near the eagle's nest. The three climb up to try and catch him, but he is scared by various things and flies away. Ghond says he will come back in a day or two and they should wait for him.
* Detailed and artistic description of a night in the open in the Himalaya mountains. Radja, a trained Brahminic priest at age sixteen, chants a morning hymn to the sun.
* The mother eagle has left the nest for good; apparently the three humans have arrived just in time to see the eaglets learning to fly, which they do by being abandoned once they are full-fledged and having to hunt for themselves or starve. The eaglets walk up the mountain, then one knocks the other off a narrow ledge by accident, and they both begin to fly.
* The three humans leave that place and go to start checking all the pigeon-lofts Gay-Neck has ever seen and might have remembered, in order to find him. Their departure ends chapter 4.
* They stay overnight at a Buddhist lamasery where one of the lamas tells them Gay-Neck sheltered the night before, and was fed and "healed of his fear" before leaving. Reassured, they continue trekking down-mountain.
* More long and luxuriant descriptions of the native wildlife, including a rather interesting if slow passage about pheasants and camouflage. Then the three travellers reach another house, belonging to a friend's father, where Gay-Neck has rested and eaten before leaving again. They stay there that night. The next night they sleep in a banyan tree in the jungle, where Ghond is nearly eaten by a tiger before reaching safety - and yet the story is completely without suspense. O_O I think a lot of why this story seems a bit less interesting than others I've read is simply that it's written by someone with a different idea of narrative structure than I'm used to. *curious face*
* Different narrative structure or no, this is a very slow book. I'm on page 61 of 191 and already getting bogged down. That's... thirty-two percent, not even a third of the way. :-(
* The travellers are frightened by a temperamental elephant feeding in the trees around them, but when it reaches its trunk up into their tree and smells them, instead of attacking it is frightened, and when the hunter Ghond accidentally sneezes in its trunk, it runs away in a panic. After waiting for the jungle to calm down again, they continue their journey, and eventually reach home, where Gay-Neck is safe and sound in their pigeon-loft. Thus ends Chapter 5.
* Chapter 6, only a few pages long, tells of how Gay-Neck flies away again the next day, stays gone for several days, and eventually the narrator-boy and Ghond hire ponies to go track him down. They get as far as being reassured by various people that Gay-Neck is alive and well, also there is more description of mornings and evening and wild geese, then the chapter ends.
* I took a break there and happened across Famous First Sentences on Tumblr, which caused me to wonder what the first sentence of this book is. (I never notice them on my own; I know "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" and "It is a truth universally acknowledged etc", and that's it.) It is "The city of Calcutta, which boasts of a million people, must have at least two million pigeons." Now you know. :D
* ...apparently they spent ten days looking for Gay-Neck, and now we are going to have at least one chapter NARRATED BY Gay-Neck telling what happened from his own point of view. Okaaaay then.
* Gay-Neck says that when his mom was killed by the hawk, he decided to kill himself by having the eagles eat him, only they wouldn't? So he flew away home, and on the way he had a fight with a hawk, and defeated it by accident when a downdraft dropped him on its head, and then he felt better and decided not to try to die after all.
* And then as soon as he saw that the boy-narrator was home and knew he was safe, he decided he had to fly ALL THE PLACES and "test [his] courage". So he went and flew back to the eagles' abandoned eyrie and poked around it, though he didn't sleep there for fear of vermin. Once the predator birds decided he was a strange sort of small eagle due to his hanging round there and started to give him a wide berth, he flew up and joined a wedge of geese flying south. After leaving the geese, he went back to the lamasery. This ends Chapter 7.
* ...and now Gay-Neck is going to give us a secondhand account of how swifts build their nests, as there were swifts at the lamasery near whom he nested. WHY DO I CARE. *sigh*
* "Among the swifts, women are not so emancipated as among the pigeons," says Gay-Neck. Apparently male swifts do not sit on the eggs, while pigeons do? Wiki is unclear, saying of swifts that "both parents assist in raising the young", and of pigeons that "both parents care for the young". Huh. Maybe the author is mistaken, or maybe there's a particular species of Indian swift that differs from the norm, or maybe the author just wanted to throw in a random reference to women's emancipation for some reason. I'm beginning to think you just never know with this writer. O_O
* Gay-Neck starts to fly south with the swifts, who are heading all the way to Sri Lanka or Africa. There is an incident where Gay-Neck fights a small sparrow-hawk to protect his friends. I'm wondering now whether it is normal for pigeons to actually fight hawks at all, or whether this is made up to show the pigeon in a heroic light, but I can't think what I'd google to find out, and I really don't want to spend much extra time reading about the habits of pigeons! ;P
* They meet ducks, who warn them about owls, and Gay-Neck spends a long and detailed night being scared of owls and then getting away from owls. Then they fly off by a roundabout route, not one of the major migration paths, so as to avoid the predators that haunt those major paths.
* They see fishing-ducks, and a thrush cracking a snail open, and men trapping peacocks by showing them a cloth painted like a tiger skin... and then Gay-Neck leaves the swifts to their migration, goes home again, and is purported to ask his master - because all this has been narrated by him in the format of a spoken story - "Why is there so much killing and inflicting of pain by birds and beasts on one another? I don't think all of you men hurt each other. Do you? But birds and beasts do. All that makes me so sad." End chapter. OH WRITER. Way to knock your readers over the head with a very thick moral. ;P
* That was the end of Part One! FIFTY-ONE PERCENT. :D
* The first chapter of Part Two is called "Gay-Neck's Training for War", so that explains the sudden OH HAI MORALIZING about violence. An attempt at Foreshadowing! :-)
* Okay, "a coming war somewhere in Europe", so World War I. The author would have been in his twenties when WWI started, but the boy-narrator is still young enough to be living with his mother and to get a scolding for staying out late.
* The narrator buys about forty more carrier pigeons and some "tumblers" (I don't know what breed that is), to train them all plus Gay-Neck for war work, in case the British War Service decides to call them up. He ties their wing-feathers together in a certain way, which works like hobbling a horse to keep them from flying until they learn to accept their new home, and not run back to their old owner who can legally keep them if they do so.
* The narrator also sells Gay-Neck, around this time, just to see if Gay-Neck will run back to him even after the two-week acclimation period. But within two days Gay-Neck has run from the new owner and disappeared. The narrator spends all afternoon looking for him without success, but the next day Gay-Neck turns up perfectly healthy.
* And now Gay-Neck is going to narrate how he did THAT.
* Gay-Neck badmouths his buyer, claiming he was given grain and water of bad quality, and that his wings were tied up with fishy-smelling string - this last, at least, there seems to be some evidence for, since Gay-Neck's wings are stated to smell of fish when he returns to the narrator.
* So anyway, Gay-Neck ran away, but a cat chased him, and he sort of jumped away from the cat, and happened to untie his wings from the string while rubbing them with his beak because they hurt, and oh-so-luckily the cat happened to be chasing the fishy-smelling string, and not the yummy pigeon at all! So Gay-Neck came home safe, and the narrator's father makes him repay the buyer's money to him even though that is not the custom. One wonders how much of that was the editor's idea.
* The chapter concludes with a description of how the narrator trained his new pigeons to have a snack of millet seeds soaked in liquid butter, every day at five, and when the time came for him to remove the hobbles from their wings, he did it a few minutes before five, so that after they flew around and stretched a bit, they came right back to him for their snack. Which is a very interesting little passage! But it could have done quite well without the sudden "alas! I have noticed that there are many men and women who resemble pigeons in this respect!" Perhaps the author thinks all his stories need morals?
* In the next chapter, Gay-Neck and two of the new pigeons fight for leadership of the pigeon flock. Gay-Neck wins, of course. Then they begin training for the pigeon competitions: flock teamwork, long-distance flight, and flight under danger.
* The teamwork competition is one where all the flocks of all the competitors are let loose, and fly so high they cannot hear their masters, and then whichever pigeon they all fall in behind is the winner. Gay-Neck wins this competition, of course, and stays in the lead of the flock all the time they are high in the sky.
* But on the way down, after all the other flocks have gone home and Gay-Neck's flock (which stayed up in the sky as a rearguard, because apparently pigeons do this) is coming home, a pair of buzzards try to attack the flock. Their technique is to drop down in front of the leader and open their wings suddenly, trying to startle the pigeons into scattering, because they refuse to attack a solid block of flying birds. But Gay-Neck is - pardon my pun - unflappable, and flies directly under both buzzards (each in turn), and holds the flock together. But the buzzards keep attacking, and scatter the flock about, while Gay-Neck tries to rally them, till eventually all but Gay-Neck and one of the new boss pigeons, Jahore, are home safe; the buzzards capture Gay-Neck and Jahore, one each, but Jahore's wriggling causes that buzzard to bump into the other one, who drops Gay-Neck safe and only slightly damaged on the roof. But Jahore gets eaten (offscreen).
* So now Gay-Neck refuses to fly, and after all his wounds are healed, the narrator is forced to conclude (not in these words) that he suffers from bird!PTSD and is afraid to go up in the air where anything can try to eat him again. And the narrator can't get him to fly very high. So the flock doesn't compete in the other two pigeon competitions.
* But Gay-Neck seems to be taking a fancy to the "widow" of Jahore, the pigeon who died, so the narrator thinks that maybe getting them to mate and raise a family will get Gay-Neck over his fear of flying and "Mrs Jahore" over her grieving for Jahore. So he packs them up in a cage and takes them to visit his friend Radja, who lives on the edge of the jungle as priest of the village Ghatsila. And to be brief, it all works out exactly as planned.
* Yup, the author is putting a moral at the end of each incident. "[A]lmost all our troubles come from fear, worry, and hate. If any man catches one of the three, the other two are added unto it." It's kind of an interesting style, really? I begin to like it.
* Also I am 68% done with this book. I like THAT, too. *g*
* Gay-Neck and the other new boss pigeon, Hira, and the hunter Ghond all go to Flanders where the Indian Army is, the two pigeons to carry messages and Ghond to be the familiar person who marks the "home" the pigeons return to, at headquarters. The narrator-boy cannot go because he's underage.
* Oh dear, and now Gay-Neck is going to tell us all about the war in his pigeon-ish dialect, which is a little bit like Up Goer Five language only now with more pointedly moralistic Not Getting Why Humans Are So Awful To Each Other! ;P ...here, have an Up Goer Five text editor. I will share. It makes me feel better. *g*
* So Gay-Neck tells us all about the "metal dogs that bark and spit fire" and "mechanical eagles" that swallow men and spit them out again alive, and... uh, how gorgeous the sound of a bomber's engine was? "Hardly had the ineffable glory of that supernal music overhead seized my soul" when the bombs start falling and people die... WHAT AM I READING. Anyway, Gay-Neck carries a message to the Commander-in-Chief of the army, "who looked like a ripe cherry and exuded a pleasant odour of soap", and he gets a pat on the head.
* Next chapter, Hira the other pigeon gets killed by a stray shot, but Gay-Neck gets through and carries a very important message saying that a division is cut off by the Germans and needs reinforcements. This chapter ends with a very dramatic illustration by Boris Artzybasheff, of Death with his scythe flying on the wings of the wind.
* In the next chapter - Chapter 6 of Part 2, and we are now 77% of the way done - we return to a narrator who knows place-names and speaks plain English, thank goodness! Apparently they're near Ypres and Armentieres.
* Ghond the hunter goes to scout an ammo dump behind enemy lines and return a map of the area via Gay-Neck. It is night. Ghond befriends a stray dog whose master has died, and makes it lead him straight to the munitions depot, which is also the German food-supply store. Then Ghond draws his map and sends it off, and the dog hauls him down under some thorn-bushes to hide in a frozen-over well. They hide there, but they're too close to the munitions dump, and they die when the Allied bombers blow it up.
* Now Gay-Neck is going to tell us about carrying the map to headquarters.
* Which he does. But one leg and one wing are broken by the sharpshooters and planes trying to shoot him down, and he loses part of his tail, and also he is again scared of flying.
* Ah, Ghond isn't dead after all. He's in the hospital, where they bring Gay-Neck once he's recovered, to visit him.
* And... now Ghond and Gay-Neck are suddenly back home in India, where Ghond explains basically what I already summed up. Okay, and Ghond is leaving for the lamasery previously introduced, but "before I recount his adventure there, I must tell the reader how Ghond happened to be transferred from the battlefields of France to our home". Yyyeah, you do that, fictionalized narrator boy.
* Okay, so the army just invalided both Ghond and Gay-Neck home, and Ghond went to the lamasery straight away, then later after confirming that Gay-Neck is refusing to fly again, the boy narrator brings Gay-Neck to the lamasery to join him.
* The trip there and the arrival is a whole lot more description. Come on, book, finish up already; is anything more actually going to happen in the last 15% or so?
* Mostly it's about how the kid meditates on peace and freedom from fear, for days on end, until somehow his lack of fear... is transferred into the pigeon? I don't know. The author seems to take it seriously, that's all I can say.
* Then near the very end of the book, the hunter Ghond, who has also been meditating on freedom from fear, is sent by the abbot of the lamasery to make a wild buffalo that has killed two people from the nearby village stop pestering the village. There is even more description while they waaaaaait for the buffalo. ;-)
* Finally, the buffalo shows up. They try to capture him alive, but don't quite succeed, and Ghond kills him with a dagger. In the scuffle Gay-Neck, who was up a tree with the narrator kid, flies away and disappears.
* They go back to the kid's parents' country home in the foothills, and Gay-Neck has arrived before them. Now everybody is happy, and at the end of the book, "instead of spinning out a sermon" *OH LOL SIR*, the author gives us a nice little paragraph on how we ought never to fear or hate, but live full of courage and love and peace like a flower is full of fragrance, the end.