Jim Lynch's Border Songs: Novel Required Reading

Border Songs

Compared with the U.S.-Mexico border, the 49th parallel hasn’t inspired much of a literary mythology. So if the Department of Homeland Security is hoping for a few terrorist thrillers to support its project of tightening the world’s longest “undefended” border, its leaders will be sorely disappointed in Jim Lynch’s Border Songs. But if by any chance they’re seeking a sense of perspective, this astutely observed, wryly funny novel should be required reading.

Lynch, a former journalist who lives in Olympia, Wash., sets his narrative along what he calls “the nonchalant border” between his state’s Whatcom County and southwestern B.C. It’s “a geographical handshake,” he writes, occasionally marked “by nothing more than a drainage ditch that turned raucous with horny frogs in the spring and overflowed into both countries every fall.” The arbitrariness of the border inspires Lynch to play up the absurdity of attempting to secure it. In Border Songs, separated by one such ditch are the homes of American dairy farmer Norm Vanderkool and retired Canadian professor Wayne Rousseau. They’re each other’s closest neighbours, but nonetheless spend ample time bickering about the perceived differences between their countries — Wayne, a medicinal pot-smoker, raises the stoic farmer’s hackles by labelling Americans as “not only homophobic and xenophobic but euphoriaphobic.”

The Americans’ increased investment in security provides for surveillance cameras, sensor alarms and more border agents; Norm’s son, unable to gain employment elsewhere, signs up with the patrol. Brandon Vanderkool, the novel’s unlikely hero, is, at 6-foot-8 and 232 pounds, ideally suited to the job’s physical aspects, but his temperament is another matter: He would rather make mental catalogues of bird calls and create spontaneous sculptures out of found objects than chase down border-hopping miscreants. Ironically, though, his wandering into little-used forest areas finds him almost inadvertently capturing so many would-be smugglers (of drugs and of people) that he becomes a minor celebrity.

Read the rest of the review here, or grab a copy of Border Songs now!

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