In Night Birds, Margaret Sweatman mines the dark caverns of global capitalism in this new addition to the resource “noir” canon. Intense, visceral, and agile, Night Birds is an all-absorbing thriller, whose morally complex characters are called upon to reckon with the power than runs beneath their feet and the consequences of their own complicity.
What inspired you to write Night Birds?
We were enduring the pandemic at that time, and I was lucky to be in quarantine with my musician husband in our home, but it was painful not to see my kids and other mortals, so I turned to a kind of writing that seeks to exceed human limitations, returning to my fascination with “the Marvellous” – a form of romance literature that yearns for transcendence.
My early, very loose notes toward Night Birds gather around the energy of the underground: Nemesis (retribution), child of Nyx (night) and Erebus (darkness). Dreams, discord, deception. Night Birds is partly about going under, to a mine, to a labyrinth. It’s interesting that the mythical labyrinth is not a natural construction: it’s a work of artistic construction by Daedalus. It’s like a mine.
And I was drawn to folly architecture – such as towers – like Carl Jung’s Bollingen Tower on Lake Zurich, which became Five Towers, the site of retreat for my novel. Add to this the tall electrical transmission towers, the beautiful, marvellously functional structures that run long-legged over the land where I live in Manitoba. And, to brighten things, I studied the miraculous art of blacksmithing, where a lump of iron can be transformed into a sword made of Damascus steel.
Are there any books that helped shape this novel?
With awe, I was reading Underland by Robert Macfarlane. And a handbook called Rocks and Minerals by Chris Pellant with gorgeous photographs by Harry Taylor: colour photos of feldspar, copper, sulphur, mercury, malachite, quartz, ironstone, and so on.
I reread Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, where I met a hermit with a bruised soul, and followed that trail till it disclosed a character for my story, a man who must retreat to Five Towers to recover from the chaos of his previous life. And some dim memory drew me to the epigraph of Mario Puzo’s novel, The Godfather: “Behind every great fortune, there is a crime.” This led me to study factual reportage on money laundering. I followed the idea that crime runs beneath our apparent civilization.
Of course, there are many books, countless books that go into the composition of a novel. These are just some that come immediately to mind.
When drawing from real life events, how do you decide which details to keep and which to fictionalize?
Everything has to go through the characters. They’re the lamp. But it’s very important to be factually accurate, and unnerving to know I can make an error in my research. The research into financial crimes was painstaking. After all, money is a foreign element for a writer, yes?
I was compelled by the true story of a village in Transylvania, Romania, a place called Rosia Montana, where in 2013 citizens gathered to protect their red mountain from a Canadian gold mining corporation. I researched the company and its push toward acquisition, and read legal reports, business and mining journalism.
Over and over, I watched a documentary called “New Eldorado: The Curse of Rosia Montana,” directed by Tibor Kocsis. Villagers, with international activists, fought to prevent the development of an open pit gold mine by a Canadian mining corporation. I also watched videos of a catastrophic breach in the dam of a tailing pond at Baia Mare, Romania in the year 2000. And videos of the breach in the Brumadinho dam in Brazil in 2019, when toxic sludge raced downhill, killing hundreds of people and poisoning their environment for the next generation. I imagined those events compressed into a single event then placed it in Rosia Montana – as if the protests against the Canadian mine had failed.
The collapse of the dam around the tailing pond is central to the story. It’s a disturbing and ever-present possibility in mining. Even now, today, I’m reading about the catastrophic breaches from copper mines in Zambia, which are destroying people’s lives. Mining is an especially ruthless business.
Night Birds is about mining and money laundering and what all of this means for the environment when the money goes dark, criminal, underground.
What do you hope readers will carry with them after finishing Night Birds?
I don’t wish to presume what readers will experience by reading my novel. When I’m reading other people’s novels, I often feel that I’m sharing a privileged, intimate space, for a little while. And when I finish reading a novel, if the experience was good, I glance back through it, as if making an effort to remember a dream that has struck an odd new chord. The very best thing, and what would be most encouraging for me as a writer, would be that a reader will feel a sensation of having heard that chord.
Margaret Sweatman is a novelist, playwright, poet, and performer. Her work has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Award, and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Night Birds is her seventh novel. She lives in Winnipeg.
