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Reviewed: The Loop By Joe Coomer Simon & Schuster Books, New York, NY ©2002, ISBN 0-684-85904-1, pb, $16.25 Cdn
Anyone who shares their life with a parrot has a unique and interesting story about how they first became involved in sharing their lives parrots. It’s probably safe to say not many of us actually had a parrot just show up on their front door, out of the blue, one day. That’s how The Loop starts out. The book’s main character, Lyman, a 30-year-old orphan, is sipping coffee in the trailer he calls home when suddenly a large green and yellow parrot lands on his screen door, enters his house and his life. This begins a whole series of events that change Lyman’s life profoundly. He embarks on a search to discover the owner of the yellow-naped Amazon, which as it turns out, is an extremely old bird that has had many human companions. The chase leads him down a very convoluted path full of false leads and dead ends. His search for the parrot’s origins echoes his own unsuccessful search for his parents, both killed in a car accident when he was three months old. No registration and or identification were found with the bodies or the vehicle, so Lyman never even knew who his parents were. At the same time the parrot enters his life, Lyman becomes more involved with Fiona, a librarian who has obviously had her eye on him for a while, but has been unsuccessful in establishing anything other than a very cursory acquaintanceship with him. She finally convinces him to take her with during a work shift — he works the graveyard shift patrolling the circular highway loop around Fort Worth, Texas for the State Dept. of Highways — which leads to first ecstasy, then agony, when she sees one of his duties involves burying dead animals found on the highway. The book is uniquely structured, in that it consists of just three chapters: the first one is 191 pages long, the second six pages, the final chapter two pages. I did feel annoyed that the publisher chose to use a color-modified macaw with a yellow head and green body, rather than a picture of a real yellow-naped Amazon, on the book's front cover. It is certainly not a “feel-good” novel, but neither does it leave one full of despair at the end. Like all truly good novels, it contains some unexpected twists, and like all truly good novels, it does not resolve everything in a tidy, zipless manner. The reader is left to ponder the future of its characters as their lives continue past its final pages. "That which hath wings shall tell the matter.” - cryptic saying of mysterious parrot from The Loop
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General Information About African Greys Fiction
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