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The Impossible Bird
There is a place—a world—where famine and poverty do not exist.
Nor sickness nor misery nor unhappiness of any kind.
Is it Heaven?
As two brothers are about to discover,
it’s more like Hell.
Michael Glynn is a hotshot director addicted to a there’s-no-success-like-excess hedonism. Daniel Glynn is a professor of literature, devoted husband, and doting father with a quietly buttoned-down life. Brothers bound by blood. But brothers waging a private civil war—an emotional feud of lies and deceit and dark secrets buried but not forgotten.
But all that is about to change.
One day the brothers are visited simultaneously by gun-wielding strangers claiming to be agents of an elite government security agency. Each brother is questioned about the whereabouts of the other. What they want is “the code.” The strangers are convinced one of the brothers possesses the code, but they aren’t sure which. Having maintained only sporadic contact, Michael and Daniel can be of no assistance. Or so they think. The strangers will not take no for an answer. Their instructions are find your brother or die.
But what begins as a cross-country manhunt—brother converging on brother—turns into an odyssey of discovery neither could have imagined. It is a journey that will take them to a world of perfect human happiness. A world purged of suffering. A world without death. A world where a life can be relived and mistakes corrected.
Both have been given a second chance. The question is, is a second chance what they really need?
For Michael and Daniel the answer to that question will be found by unraveling the mystery of the impossible bird.
Nor sickness nor misery nor unhappiness of any kind.
Is it Heaven?
As two brothers are about to discover,
it’s more like Hell.
Michael Glynn is a hotshot director addicted to a there’s-no-success-like-excess hedonism. Daniel Glynn is a professor of literature, devoted husband, and doting father with a quietly buttoned-down life. Brothers bound by blood. But brothers waging a private civil war—an emotional feud of lies and deceit and dark secrets buried but not forgotten.
But all that is about to change.
One day the brothers are visited simultaneously by gun-wielding strangers claiming to be agents of an elite government security agency. Each brother is questioned about the whereabouts of the other. What they want is “the code.” The strangers are convinced one of the brothers possesses the code, but they aren’t sure which. Having maintained only sporadic contact, Michael and Daniel can be of no assistance. Or so they think. The strangers will not take no for an answer. Their instructions are find your brother or die.
But what begins as a cross-country manhunt—brother converging on brother—turns into an odyssey of discovery neither could have imagined. It is a journey that will take them to a world of perfect human happiness. A world purged of suffering. A world without death. A world where a life can be relived and mistakes corrected.
Both have been given a second chance. The question is, is a second chance what they really need?
For Michael and Daniel the answer to that question will be found by unraveling the mystery of the impossible bird.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
5 people are currently reading
107 people want to read
About the author
Patrick O'Leary
13 books21 followersPatrick O'Leary (Saginaw, Michigan, September 13, 1952) is an American science fiction and fantasy author and ad copy writer.
O'Leary's literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series. He wrote the poem "Nobody Knows It But Me" which was used in the popular 2002 advertising campaign for the Chevrolet Tahoe and read in the commercial by James Garner.
Works: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?P...
O'Leary's literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series. He wrote the poem "Nobody Knows It But Me" which was used in the popular 2002 advertising campaign for the Chevrolet Tahoe and read in the commercial by James Garner.
Works: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?P...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 26, 2009
This is probably one of the best books I've read all year. And the best thing is I got it for $1 at a library book sale.
It starts out crazy and confusing for the two main characters and you're sucked in as a reader, wondering, what the hell is happening?
And the story progresses, eking out small nibblets of information that you gobble up and enjoy and they just make you want to keep on reading.
The storyline stays strong throughout, even at the end. I've been disappointed with the last few novels I've read that have weak endings that just screw up the whole previous reading experience.
This is well-written and good. It makes you think and hope and wonder. What else can a book do?
Read this.
It starts out crazy and confusing for the two main characters and you're sucked in as a reader, wondering, what the hell is happening?
And the story progresses, eking out small nibblets of information that you gobble up and enjoy and they just make you want to keep on reading.
The storyline stays strong throughout, even at the end. I've been disappointed with the last few novels I've read that have weak endings that just screw up the whole previous reading experience.
This is well-written and good. It makes you think and hope and wonder. What else can a book do?
Read this.
September 24, 2012
Interesting, although I do think it kind of got caught up in it's own mysticalness in the end, and seemed to trip over itself. A lovely read, though not my favorite book of the genre.
December 8, 2010
I think I really liked this book, but it's so thick and mystical it was hard to be sure. It's a strong maybe? I couldn't really get into it for the first third, it was too confusing, but eventually some of the pieces started showing up (Oh, they're *both* talking about that woman!) and some of what went before made sense. The story made very little sense, even internally, which led to a sort of dream-state; it made sense in a story about death and hypnosis. The backstory is a brilliant description of what happens in children from messed-up families.
November 26, 2014
I bought The Impossible Bird based on my past experience with Patrick O'Leary, including his wonderful debut novel, Door Number Three, which I commented on here, and The Gift. O'Leary seemed to be some kind of cross between the wild ideas of Philip K. Dick with the literary sensibilities of Gene Wolfe, and in those two books the combination worked very well. And that's why the first 70 pages or so of the The Impossible Bird were such a surprise, and unfortunately, not a pleasant one, for it seemed to be all random violence in endless plot sequence without any textual beauty. I put the book down for weeks and only returned to it today because I had nominated for our monthly book club and the meeting was tonight.
Having now finished it, I still don't think it rises to the level of his previous books but I'm not as disappointed with it as I thought I'd be. I found the theme, that life is not worth living if there's no death to measure it by, to be interesting, if not necessarily something I would agree with, and there was some explanation for the rough violence of the beginning. But mainly I'm left with a sense that the novel suffers from the all too easy comparison to the movie, The Matrix, and while these themes and ideas were around long before that movie, it now looms large in the public consciousness.
The basic story, and I'm trying not to give anything away here, is of two very close brothers with a mysterious connection that goes beyond their familial relation and what happens after their deaths. This life-after-death plot is a lot like Jonathan Carroll's similarly flawed novel, White Apples, in that by removing the reader from the "known" world of reality, a loss of structure becomes very hard for the reader to grasp. It's as if there were no rules left for the writer to have to follow, nor for the reader to assume, and the result is a hazy world of dreams that quickly breaks down into a series of talking heads. O'Leary tries to spice this up with some "bullet-time" action (even going so far in one scene as to actually slow down the bullet so that a character can reach out and touch it), but without the framing world, it quickly becomes full of action and fury that ultimately means little to the overall story (in fact, the little logic of the world starts really breaking down when you start to question "why does it take these three things to escape the matrix, and why not others...").
The ending (and spoilers may be here) tries to resolve this, by working around to a reconciliation of the charaters to the main theme, but the gung-ho plot antics made me care much less for the characters when we got to that end. Like them, I was pretty much just ready for it to be over, which may have been what they were looking for, but isn't necessarily the emotion you wish to evoke from your readers.
Having now finished it, I still don't think it rises to the level of his previous books but I'm not as disappointed with it as I thought I'd be. I found the theme, that life is not worth living if there's no death to measure it by, to be interesting, if not necessarily something I would agree with, and there was some explanation for the rough violence of the beginning. But mainly I'm left with a sense that the novel suffers from the all too easy comparison to the movie, The Matrix, and while these themes and ideas were around long before that movie, it now looms large in the public consciousness.
The basic story, and I'm trying not to give anything away here, is of two very close brothers with a mysterious connection that goes beyond their familial relation and what happens after their deaths. This life-after-death plot is a lot like Jonathan Carroll's similarly flawed novel, White Apples, in that by removing the reader from the "known" world of reality, a loss of structure becomes very hard for the reader to grasp. It's as if there were no rules left for the writer to have to follow, nor for the reader to assume, and the result is a hazy world of dreams that quickly breaks down into a series of talking heads. O'Leary tries to spice this up with some "bullet-time" action (even going so far in one scene as to actually slow down the bullet so that a character can reach out and touch it), but without the framing world, it quickly becomes full of action and fury that ultimately means little to the overall story (in fact, the little logic of the world starts really breaking down when you start to question "why does it take these three things to escape the matrix, and why not others...").
The ending (and spoilers may be here) tries to resolve this, by working around to a reconciliation of the charaters to the main theme, but the gung-ho plot antics made me care much less for the characters when we got to that end. Like them, I was pretty much just ready for it to be over, which may have been what they were looking for, but isn't necessarily the emotion you wish to evoke from your readers.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 4, 2014
One of those books you look forward to reading again. Brilliant blend of fantasy and horror and scifi.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews