Border Songs

This is a very entertaining tale set in the area of a Pacific Northwest unmanned border crossing between the U.S. and Canada. Brandon Vanderkool - one of a great lineup of characters - has been hired by the Border Patrol. He is 6 foot 8, severely dyslexic, but brilliant at catching smugglers - mostly by chance. He is also a talented but unrecognized artist. This is a quirky but believable story, thanks to the characters and the absorbing tale that can reveal real-life heartache as well as joy. I'll be looking for more by Jim Lynch. Highly recommended.

Brandon Vanderkool grew up on a dairy farm that skirts the Canadian border. All his life, he has regarded the people across the road--in another country--as his neighbours. Socially awkward, due in part to being 6'8" and extremely dyslexic, Brandon excels at art, is an avid birdwatcher, and notices things that other people don't. Somehow he has fallen into a job as a border patrol agent, and surprises everyone by excelling at this too. With seemingly little effort, Brandon becomes a star employee by sweeping up human traffickers, possible terrorists, and a lot of drug smugglers.

Brandon is an endearing quirky character in a novel full of quirky endearing characters. There is his kind dad Norm, who is struggling to keep the family farm show more from collapsing; his wise mom who is showing signs of early-onset Alzheimers; his boyhood crush, Madeline, over on Zero Avenue, and her grumpy retired professor father, who likes to stand on his deck smoking pot and taunting his US neighbours. These are some of the characters that are seeing their lives change in a post-911 world where the US government jumps at every shadow that darkens the border.

This book is interesting, funny, smart--the whole package. Lynch obviously did his research well in exploring the subculture of life on the border. This is an area that I know fairly well (my dad's family dairy farm--which, like many of the dairy farms in the book, is now a raspberry farm--sits atop the Canadian side of the border), and the author gets the little details right. That always scores extra points from me. He also does an admirable job of weaving in facts and philosophy surrounding the multi-billion dollar marijuana industry (his journalism background shows here).

Recommended for: readers who like intelligent, interesting books with quirky characters. show less

In Border Songs, Jim Lynch deftly paints a portion of the Canadian-U.S. border that separates Washington from British Colombia. Tension caused by politics and the U.S. effort to secure the border has driven a rift between communities and friends that for years were used to hopping the ditch that constitutes a section of the border to visit between countries. Now a nub of a joint thrown across the ditch in derision, or a late-night incursion to shoot out a new border camera are what passes for interaction, except for the constant flow south of smuggled bodies and loads of B.C. Bud, which the U.S. Border Patrol does its best to stop. Brandon Vanderkool is a new Border Patrol agent who just happened to grow up in Blaine within spitting show more distance of the border, and still lives there with his parents on the failing family dairy farm.

Brandon is a 6’ 8”, 23 year old, severely dyslexic, sensitive innocent who watches birds obsessively. He paints birds, and everyone he has arrested, and creates temporary sculptures from natural materials, sometimes on duty, which results in an embarrassing incident. He also happens to be extraordinarily skilled at catching smugglers. Brandon’s mother is losing her memory. His father is struggling with the farm and the temptation of easy money to be made by looking the other way. Brandon is unused to the attention he is getting by making high-profile arrests, and is trying to reconnect with Madeline Rousseau, a Canadian childhood friend turned bud smuggler. show less

Brandon Vanderkool’s colleagues on the US Border Patrol rightly call him a “s--- magnet.” A newbie agent on a 30-mile sector between Washington and British Columbia (where the international border is sometimes a mere ditch between neighbors’ yards), Brandon is freakishly tall, dyslexic and probably autistic, an avid birder and artist -- with eyes that are “really, really wide open […] it’s like he expects something to happen at every moment, no matter where he is or what he’s doing.”

And happen it does -- from stumbling upon trucks full of illegal immigrants while searching for solitude, to finding contraband where he’s birding -- all to the reader’s amazement and amusement, but to Brandon’s utter dismay since his show more disabilities make the paperwork and notoriety a nightmare. But when he happens upon a stolen car with a Middle-Eastern driver, a trunkful of explosives, and a map to Seattle’s Space Needle, everything changes. The Feds descend, the Patrol gathers reinforcements, and local social and political stresses heat to a boil.

Still, it’s a comic boil, deepened by subplots involving a terrific set of secondary characters and eclectic townspeople. A thoughtful, engaging, and thoroughly entertaining read. show less

I loved Jim Lynch’s first novel, a coming of age story about a boy, a girl, and the creatures of the sea, called The Highest Tide. There is a passage in The Highest Tide in which a reporter asks the young protagonist Miles why it is that he’s always finding things no one else does: “Because I’m always looking … and there are so many things to see.” The reporter continues: “So, maybe… when you found that squid, maybe the earth is trying to tell us something. And if so, what do you think it’s saying?” Miles hesitated and replied, “It’s probably saying, ‘Pay attention.’”

In Border Songs, Lynch again tackles similar themes with a boy who pays attention, a girl he loves, and the incredible diversity of Mother show more Nature's progeny. Although the main character, Brandon Vanderkool, is twenty-three, I would also consider this another coming of age book: Brandon is dyslexic and it is likely he has Asperger’s Syndrome; his development has been slower than other people's. In fact, he has much in common with the boy in Francisco Stork’s Marcelo in the Real World, who has Asperger's.

Brandon is 6’8” tall, socially and physically awkward, and he rocks back and forth and gets his words backwards when he is nervous (which is basically most of the time when he is not alone). He is incapable of “posing.” His dad runs a failing dairy farm, his mom has early Alzheimer’s, and they live on the ill-defined border between the U.S. and Canada in Blaine, at the top left corner of Washington State. The U.S./Canadian border is 4200 miles long, and much of it is “less delineated than the average cul-de-sac.” Brandon recently signed up with the Border Patrol to help out with expenses at home. It’s really his first time out “in the real world.” He was home schooled because of all the teasing, and doesn’t really know how to interact socially very well. But since he was young, he has been in love with his childhood friend right across the border, Madeline Rousseau.

Brandon turns out to be a huge success as a Border Patroller, because he pays attention to things others do not. He knows that if an owl screeches, or a heron takes flight, or birdsong changes, someone is moving through the area. He also goes to places other do not - looking for different birds, or constructing artwork out of nature. But it seems like he’s always interrupted; incursions across the border are constant. Would-be terrorists and vans full of human cargo make regular runs across his territory. And since the cultivation and use of marijuana is widespread on the Canadian side, there is also an especially large traffic in “buds” and money.

The narrative point of view moves back and forth across the border as well: sometimes we hear from Brandon or his father Norm, and sometimes from Madeline or her father Wayne. Madeline grows marijuana and is kept high and in the thrall of a shady dealer. Wayne uses marijuana for medicinal reasons; he has Multiple Sclerosis. He spends what he believes are his last days seeking to experience "greatness" by replicating the experimental processes followed by geniuses throughout history.

Dionne, Brandon’s earthy supervisor, and Sophie, Brandon’s nosy but charming neighbor, also take an occasional narrative lead. Dionne is funny, chunky, sexy, droll, sardonic, focused, and absolutely someone you want to go drinking with, even if you don’t drink. Sophie is everything to everyone, depending on what they want, but with the added humorous touch that both parties are aware of the dynamic.

Besides being with Madeline, Brandon is happiest when he experiences the rich variety of bird life by the Semiahmoo Bay [a habitat which supports more than 333 species and is called Canada’s most important birding area]. After one social occasion to which he was obliged to go, he thought:

"Talking was a letdown after the day he’d had. That morning he’d counted thirty-two species, including skinny oystercatchers, black-bellied plovers, western sandpipers and Pacific loons fresh from the north. The valley felt alive again. The night before he’d driven out to the old Sumas Customs House before sunset and waited thirty-five minutes before a lone Vaux’s swift swooped into view. After that slender bird disappeared into one of the two bulky chimneys, there was a pause before another dozen dove into the hole, followed by hundreds more, foraging the twilight for insects on their downward spiral, several hundred swifts forming a tall funnel that swirled into the same chimney like a genie returning to its bottle.”

Discussion: Lynch clearly loves the habitat of the bays of Washington State, and shares his passion for its beauty and abundance in his two books, The Highest Tide, and now Border Songs. His work also shows a wry and tender sympathy for young boys in love, and his other colorful characters are rendered with such care and affection that you can’t help but come to share Lynch’s obvious fondness for them.

The border issues, which weave all the people together in this book, are interesting and very timely. With so much focus in the news on the southern border, this book should serve as a corrective to the imbalance in our awareness of the geopolitical landscape.

Evaluation: If you have not picked up a book by Jim Lynch, you are missing out on a very talented author. His simple stories, with their quiet wit and absorbing and evocative descriptions of the inhabitants (both human and non) of the Northwest, are full of compassion for the human race, interesting facts about nature, and a subtle optimism that overtakes you by the end. I highly recommend both of the books discussed here! show less

The 2009 novel, Border Songs by Jim Lynch, made this reviewer laugh out loud at the author's right-on-point depictions of the various characters living and working near Abbotsford, BC, Canada, and Lynden, Blaine, and Bellingham, Washington.

There are Border Patrol Agents drawn to humorous effect; there's two neighbors - a dairy farmer and a retired, pot smoking professor - who harass each other by throwing various quips across the ditch that serves as the northern border's line of demarcation; and there's the main character, Brandon Vanderkool, perhaps an undiagnosed Aspergers savant, who can't really decode the expressions on people's faces nor sort through the raucous vocal discussions that surround him both at work and at the local show more watering hole. Vanderkool is definitely a variant living in a restrictive small town who puzzles locals as he goes his own creative way.

The major drawback to Lynch's effort here is that the novel suffers from a split personality. On the one hand, the reader is drawn into all the local escapades that are harmless and hilarious at the same time. On the other hand, the description of how easily one specific local is drawn into the big bucks of an active cross-border drug trade and ultimately feels as though she has no means of escape doesn't deserve the flippant and breezy off-handedness nor easy ending that Lynch frames for her in the novel.

While essentially worth the time it takes to read it, Border Songs suffers from an author who seems unsure of what his story is actually about. show less

I loved Brandon - he's so genuine. His gift of observation delivers many arrests for the border patrol and results in bewilderment for him. He's not sure that it's to anyone's benefit except perhaps his supervisors who are racking up more arrests than they dreamed of. The families along the Washington/Canada border are all interesting - failed dairy farms, mcmansions and a thriving underground pot economy, not to mention the iimmigrants alogn the border. Brandon's own father and mother fight battles with illness and problems with the herd, including beloved Pearl. His childhood friend Madeline becomes involved in the pot production and her father trys to duplicate Einsteins experiments. All in all, Lynch has written a character rich show more quirky story of people who just don't quite fit in with mainstream Canada or America - I enjoyed every one of them. show less