An intrepid pigeon and a patient war hero are at the heart of this sweet and creative novel set during World War I. 

Kathleen Rooney knew that writing half of her new book, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, from the point of view of a pigeon was a risk. But to the self-described animal lover, assuming a bird’s POV made perfect sense.

“A lot of people dislike and malign pigeons, but I never have,” Rooney says from her Chicago home, where she lives with her spouse, author Martin Seay. She rejects the idea of pigeons as rats with wings. “If you watch them, they’re such good fliers. . . . They’re really clean and smart. And rats aren’t that bad, either. They’re doing the best they can!”

Rooney, perhaps best known for her 2017 bestseller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, says her interest in a feathered narrator was sparked by one of her students at DePaul University, where she is an English professor. “A student named Brian referenced Cher Ami in a poem and said to me, ‘Look it up!’ Of course, I did—and it blew my mind that this pigeon was so heroic and is stuffed and on display in the Smithsonian.”

Her researcher instincts activated, Rooney learned that Cher Ami, a British homing pigeon, helped save a group of American troops known as the “Lost Battalion” during a horrific, multi­day World War I battle. The story of this amazing pigeon, the terrible conflict and the extraordinary man who commanded the beleaguered battalion—Major Charles Whittlesey, the other narrator of the novel—is strange, true and, in Rooney’s hands, altogether haunting and compelling.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.

“Once I learned about Charles, I was fascinated with him—how good he was at some things, yet how ill-suited he was to be a war hero,” Rooney says. In her reading about the era, she was intrigued by the cultural fixation on masculinity, a complicated issue that we continue to contemplate a hundred years later. “It was the early 20th century, people were moving from rural to urban, and there was a real fear of men getting soft,” Rooney explains. “Going to war was something you had to do if you wanted to be a man.”

In Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, Charles reflects on his happier prewar days in New York City, where he ran a law firm with a college classmate. Many an evening, he visited parts of the city where he could spend time with other closeted gay men and truly feel like himself. When it came time for battle, though, he focused on strategy and survival as he and his men, positioned in trenches in a section of the French Argonne Forest known as “the pocket,” found themselves cut off from supply lines, surrounded by enemy German troops and subjected to so-called friendly fire.

Carrier pigeons were the group’s only hope of contacting headquarters and getting the other Americans to stop dropping shells on them. Cher Ami flew through gunfire to deliver Charles’ message, which finally stopped the onslaught. (Incredibly, the note ended with “For heaven’s sake, stop it.”) She lost an eye and a leg, among other wounds, but was eventually able to hobble around on a tiny wooden prosthesis that the Army made for her. She lived another year before dying of her injuries in 1919, but in the novel she continues speaking to readers from her perch behind glass at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where she’s been since her death.

“In so much of the world, there are those who have an enjoyable life built on violence they don’t see. I hope it makes people think about that.”

Of visiting Cher Ami at the museum, Rooney says, “I found it profoundly moving. The conflicts killed 10 million solders, 10 million civilians, and untold animals were lost. The fact that she was so important that they saved her, when normally pigeons with those injuries would have just been discarded, shows what she did and how important it was.”

There’s an interesting lesson to be learned from Charles’ decisions in battle, too. “He was famous for something we’d describe as passive,” Rooney says. “Once they were in the pocket, he waited as hard as he could. I’m an impatient, active person. . . . His act was stillness, waiting, keeping everybody’s spirits up. The way he did that was amazing.”

Although Charles was able to save 194 members of his 500-man division, he couldn’t save everyone, and the experience took a heavy toll. He and his compatriots were given medals, held up as heroes and reminded of their wartime experiences daily, in a time when PTSD was only just beginning to be acknowledged.

“The only cure [for PTSD] is prevention,” Rooney says. “War has been around forever, but I think it can end. It breaks people, and the way to not break people is to not make them [go to war] in the first place.”

With Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, she hopes “to make people think about why we still do this. To what extent, as a civilization, are we complicit? In so much of the world, there are those who have an enjoyable life built on violence they don’t see. I hope it makes people think about that.”

Rooney also hopes the book, with its portrayal of the charming and brave Cher Ami, will boost appreciation of our furry and feathered friends. After all, she says, “What aerodynamically is really happening when a bird like that goes into the air? Pigeons are really miraculous animals, and I think if you pick any animal and go really deep into how does it work, no matter your belief system, it makes you aware of something outside yourself.”

Author photo by Beth Rooney

It’s been 30 years since the publication of The Pillars of the Earth, Welsh author Ken Follett’s enormously beloved novel about the building of a Gothic cathedral, and the publication of its highly anticipated prequel, The Evening and the Morning, is cause for much fanfare. Set at the end of the Dark Ages, the nearly 500 years of incredibly slow progress that came after the fall of the Roman Empire, it follows three figures during this period of immense change. It’s a hefty, expansive epic worthy of deep reading by history fans. To celebrate this momentous release, we reached out to Follett to learn more about his literary life.

Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child.
I’d say that the first big thrill of my life was joining Canton Library in Cardiff at age 7. Canton Library—found on Library Street—is an absolutely stunning building. The philanthropist Andrew Carnegie donated the money for the library, around £5,000 at the time, and it was built on the site of an old market. Carnegie, a Scottish American industrialist, gave away a huge proportion of his fortune, funding more than 650 libraries in the U.K., plus more than 1,500 in America. Undoubtedly, he transformed lives. Canton Library certainly changed mine.

What is on your “bucket list” of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet?
The Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. It’s architecturally stunning and contains 40 million items.

While researching your books, has there ever been a surprisingly relevant discovery among the stacks?
When I wrote Eye of the Needle in 1977, I had never been to Scotland, but half the book is set there. However, I could not afford to go on a research trip. The public library in Farnborough, Surrey, had a touring guide to Scotland, which was helpful for a special reason: It was out of date, having been published 30 years earlier—which was perfect for me, because the story is set during the Second World War.

How is your personal library organized?
My own library at home is not big enough for all my books, so the whole house has effectively become a library. I’ve arranged novels alphabetically by author and history books chronologically by subject. This makes everything easy to find. But I periodically run out of space.

What’s the last thing you checked out from your local library or bought at a bookstore?
I haven’t been to a bookstore since March, for obvious reasons, but the last thing I bought was The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu by Charlie English [published in the U.S. under the title The Storied City].

When you enter a bookstore, where do you go first?
The bestsellers table. I want to see who is doing well.

What is your ideal bookstore-­browsing snack?
I’m afraid I think it’s bad manners to eat while browsing. Sorry.

Bookstore cats or dogs?
I’m a dogs man.

Author photo © Olivier Favre

Jess Walter may not be the first writer to come out of Spokane, Washington, but he has certainly put it on the literary map. In his latest novel, The Cold Millions, the bestselling author draws readers into a tale set just after the turn of the 20th century, as modernity and labor strife collide in the mining, agricultural and railroad hub of Spokane. It stars two young brothers, “tramps” named Rye and Gig, but real historical figures such as activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn also make appearances.

You have some strong personal connections to this story, being from Spokane but also with your family history, your grandfather’s experiences as a rancher and your father’s role as a union officer. Tell us something about the inspiration for the story and how you developed it—not just the setting, but also Ursula and the villain, Brand.
I used to be ashamed of my working-class roots, but my family and hometown inform much of what I do. The Cold Millions is about two hobos just after the turn of the 20th century; a generation later, both my grandfathers were vagrant workers. My dad’s dad, my namesake Jess Walter, arrived in Spokane on a train he’d hopped in the Dakotas. My dad was a steelworker and a union guy, and labor equality was as close to a religion as we had.

I often start with divergent goals for a book and then try to connect them. Here, the impulse was to tell a story about social justice and youthful activism and pair it with a rollicking adventure story, part Western and part noir. The thrill is often in finding characters you never imagined in your original conception of the book, like Ursula the Great. You’re doing research, bent over 110-year-old newspapers, when you notice the ads for vaudeville shows, and next thing you know, this salty woman is taking over, singing to a wild cougar.

“Put me in Paris, and I’d probably write about meth addicts trying to pawn a stolen bidet.”

It’s been eight years since your previous novel, Beautiful Ruins, was published. Can you give us some insight into the creation of the two novels? How was the process different?
It always takes a while to realize that nothing I wrote before can help with this book. Eventually, familiar patterns and themes emerge, but early on, every novel feels like a first novel. The Cold Millions required more research than most of my books, so I spent months reading old newspapers and tracking down obscure books, articles and academic papers. Finally, at some point, I had to fire the whole research department (me) and rely more heavily on the fiction unit (also me). I guess if anything carried over from Beautiful Ruins, it was my interest in a more expansive kind of storytelling, in not being limited to a single point of view.

Spokane has become your Yoknapatawpha County. How do your fellow residents feel about being spotlighted in your books?
I love Faulkner’s invented settings, as I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo or Louise Erdrich’s Argus, but my fictional setting is also a real one, more like William Kennedy’s Albany or Elena Ferrante’s Naples (in an aspirational way). I loved how John Steinbeck wrote about Monterey with such heart (“Cannery row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise . . .”). And because I also venture out in my writing—to Italy, to Hollywood, to New York—writing about Spokane always feels like coming home.

What do my fellow Spokanites think? Most are appreciative, I think. I do hear from some who wish I wouldn’t focus so much on crime and poverty, that I maybe I might set a story on Spokane’s swanky South Hill for once, perhaps at the Manito Country Club. But I’ve never lived there. I’ve always lived in the flats just above the river. Although it might not matter anyway. Put me in Paris, and I’d probably write about meth addicts trying to pawn a stolen bidet.

You’ve described this book as “the last Western.” How is that so?
Yikes, did I say that? Such self-importance! I should’ve included the word gasp, as in last-gasp Western, because the period I’m writing about—1909, cars sharing the roads with horses, a certain frontier lawlessness around the edges—marks the end of this mythic Western period. But with the class divisions, the blatant unfairness, the social unrest, I also felt like I was writing about now. Maybe what I meant was this was my last Western (my only Western). I used to demean that whole genre as “horse porn.” But all I seem to do as a writer is break my own aesthetic rules and reverse every formerly unshakable opinion that has ever escaped my mouth.

You’ve now published crime novels, a 9/11 phantasmagoria, a Hollywood love story and now a historical novel. What impels you to try new genres?
A phantasmagoria! I don’t really think of genre when I’m writing. The story I’m telling just proceeds from the voice and the characters I create. I hope a wry wistfulness connects them all, a sense of jaded, bemused compassion. I do take pride in not repeating myself creatively. But that’s more to avoid boredom than to honor some artistic pledge I’ve made. I just try to write the next book I want to read, and since I read across genres, it’s always made sense to write across them, too.

I noticed the name “Tursi” (a character in Beautiful Ruins) popped up in The Cold Millions. Is that a nod to your fans? To your characters?
It’s probably more a nod to my characters. I imagine a distant great-uncle of Pasquale’s making his way to the United States and settling in Spokane’s Little Italy (where my wife was raised, and where I worked my first job as a dishwasher and busboy at Geno’s Fabulous Pizza). In The Cold Millions, Rye makes the observation that the world is “becoming one place,” and I kind of imagine my fictional world that way, too, as one place, full of coincidence and serendipity.

“If it’s true you cannot have racial justice without economic justice, then the opposite must surely follow.”

Aside from the research you did, did you read at all for pleasure when writing the book?
Of course! I read Wolf Hall for the first time and thought it was terrific. I went on a glorious Alice Munro bender and then reread James Baldwin. I read Denis Johnson’s great The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, and because he mentioned Leonard Gardner’s Fat City in an interview, I read that, too. Olga Togarczuk’s Flights, Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House and Percival Everett’s Telephone haunted and illuminated. Oh, and poets: Christopher Howell’s The Grief of a Happy Life, Jericho Brown’s The Tradition and Dorianne Laux’s Only as the Day Is Long.

I understand you are a younger brother. Did your relationship with your older brother influence your portrait of Gig and Rye? If there is a movie, who would play them?
Actually, I’m a classic middle child, with an older sister, Kristie, who is a county library director, and a younger brother, Ralph, who is a newspaper sports editor. I’m close with both of my siblings, and my brother is probably my best friend. Ralph and I share the gravitational mix of camaraderie and responsibility that Gig and Rye feel for one another, but little else of our relationship appears in The Cold Millions. A novel about my brother and me would be only six pages long, and four of those pages would be dialogue lifted directly from Caddyshack, with the rest being boozy smack-talk about who is the better basketball player. (I am.)

As for movies, I have never been able to “cast” my books—my sense of Hollywood is stuck in about 1974 (and I don’t think Steve McQueen is available). But in a movie about my brother and me, I would be played by George Clooney, and he would be played by a potted plant.

Is any of the socialist, revolutionary spirit still alive in Spokane?
Sure. The city of Spokane, like most urban areas, is reliably blue now (about 60% for Hillary Clinton in 2016), but the city is surrounded by the reddish counties of eastern Washington and lies within the larger, liberal Pacific Northwest. There are veins of individualism on both the left and the right here that come together in places like barters fairs and survivalist expos—a kind of leave-us-the-hell-alone libertarianism. There are also thriving anti-fascist groups, and the Wobblies are still around, having been revived by the Seattle WTO protests of 1999. Like everywhere, I think the real revolutionary spirit right now lies in the protests sparked by Black Lives Matter. As it should be. If it’s true you cannot have racial justice without economic justice, then the opposite must surely follow.

What’s next for you?
Creatively, a book of short stories, which I’m pulling together now. And I’m having fun working on the next novel. And later today I’ll play my brother in a social distance basketball game (we shoot at opposite ends of a full court) that I am certain to win.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Cold Millions.

Author photo by Rajah Bose