Book Review - Kirk Wallace Johnson's The Feather Thief
The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson
Published by: Penguin Books
Publication Date: April 24th, 2018
Format: Paperback, 336 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy
The Natural History Museum at Tring started it's life as the private museum of the 2nd Baron Rothschild who was often seen riding his zebra-drawn carriage around the estate. On his death the Rothschild family donated the museum and its contents to the nation. This suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History has many taxidermied specimens on display but its real wealth isn't for the public to see. This wealth consists of one of the largest orinthological collections in the world. Some of the bird skins within the museum were collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin. Which makes the crime that was about to happen not just egomaniacal but incalculably horrific in its impact to the study of the natural world. On June 24th, 2009, the museum was broken into and 299 specimens were stolen. Even if the specimens were recovered their scientific value was now worthless. The perpetrator was an American student, a flautist, Edwin Rist, who was caught and pled guilty over a year after the crime was committed. But why did Edwin break into an inconspicuous outpost of the British Natural History Museum? Edwin was a master fly-tier and had come up against the problem all master fly-tiers do in the modern era; what do you do when you want to recreate a specific salmon fly from the Victorian era but the bird feathers needed come from extinct species? There are those who find substitutions, but there are those, like Edwin, who would accept no substitutes and he figured out a way to get his hands on Victorian birds. It just so happened it was very illegal. Not to mention immoral. He could possibly have gotten away with it if he hadn't become greedy. The internet is full of people looking for illegal goods, it just so happens that Edwin was willing to share his. For a price. A retired detective at a fly-tier convention thought the bird skins he saw were suspect. They looked to be museum quality because they were. They had been a part of the Tring Heist. To protect themselves the fly-tier community turned on Edwin, much to his surprise. But he had a good lawyer, a willing doctor, and, in the end, to the uneducated, it was only dead birds after all. Yet one question remained, what happened to the specimens that were never recovered? Kirk Wallace Johnson was determined to find out.
The Feather Thief is an odd book. I say odd because it's built on a three act structure that should and traditionally does work but here falls flat. We start with the history, move onto the crime, and then round it out with the hunt for answers. And the problem lies in Kirk Wallace Johnson's hunt for answers. He latched onto this case because he took up fly-fishing to help with his PTSD from doing years of aid work in Iraq and it gave him an escape from his own problems. Which means he had a vested interest in tracking down Edwin Rist and the missing specimens. While he has worked as a journalist his writing in the third act felt very amateurish. His drive didn't spark in me a desire for resolution, it sparked in me a desire that the book should have been edited a little better. Because, don't get me wrong, this is a really good book, the first two acts are wonderful. Which makes his naivete about the true crime genre that much more glaring. But seriously, I don't want to focus on the negative in this review, I want to focus on the positive. Because, damn, I really should have known more about "feather fever." I watch enough costume dramas and read enough books that I can see with my own eyes the fetish for feathers that the Victorians engendered. I just had no idea it was this crazy. When the Titanic went down the most valuable thing they were carrying in their hull was feathers. That is just crazy to me. Tons and tons of feathers are down at the bottom of the ocean with all those lost souls and that one crazy billionaire and his family. My Dad used to tell the tale of an artist his gallery represented. Owen J. Gromme, while being a painter of the natural world, started out working for various museums and took several trips to Africa. On one trip he was with a member of the royal family of Britain and the carcasses of animals and birds was so vast that he was overcome with disgust. This story is why I shouldn't have been surprised by Edwin Rist. Humans will always seek to kill what is beautiful to claim it as theirs. Be it beasts or birds, they are covetous and horrible. The only justification for all the dead birds that Alfred Russel Wallace brought back was the scientific developments that could arise from the wholesale slaughter of now extinct birds. But Edwin Rist took that all away. He was a selfish boy who did not get punished as he should have. Where he is now matters not. Only the void he left matters.
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