Anna Pigeon Flies Northwest for the Winter
By Breanne Boland April 22, 2004 Issue

If I were a member of the National Park Service, I’d want to be just like Anna Pigeon. Hell, I’m a writer, and I still want to be just like Anna Pigeon. She’s smart, quick, and brave, with a full and interesting life. However, lest such virtue become monotonous, she’s also stubborn, plagued with pride, and pestered by a few other faults of which she’s painfully aware of and often annoyed at.

In High Country, four seasonal park employees disappear in Yosemite National Park, and an out-of-park ranger is needed to do some undercover investigation. Anna is called from her own park in Mississippi because the community within Yosemite is so circumscribed that one of its own officers would be discovered immediately. Legalistic Anna chafes at the disguises and necessary lies, but she also thrills at the challenges the assignment presents her—not only maintaining a convincing fake identity, flying under the radar of the villains she knows float invisibly around her, but being a believable career waitress all the while.

The book makes great use of the third person, leading us through Anna’s thoughts and intuitive leaps while using its distance to keep us from feeling too jerked around or overly directed. I felt like I understood the way a keenly investigative mind works. Anna made leaps of logic I wouldn’t have thought of had I been in her situation, but they still made perfect sense. Anna sees possibility and suspiciousness in every shadow and friendly face, and her necessary paranoia was making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up by the middle of the book.

And she has paranoia aplenty. She’s completely isolated, utterly without allies except for the NPS officers she can only meet with in secret. She’s bankrupt of anything familiar and comfortable, far from her home and fiancé in Mississippi, and the parks she considers home. However, she feels no less distinct a character for being out of her element. We don’t have Anna’s home and her friends to give us clues as to who she really is, but her character doesn’t suffer for it. Barr has had eleven books before this one to explore her heroine, and it shows. Whether Anna is lounging in the Yosemite employee dorms, probing her teenage roommates for information about the missing workers, or running through the woods, danger nipping at her heels, she feels whole and real. Of course, that may have something to do with Barr being a member of the NPS herself, and also being a spry woman entering middle age while living in Mississippi. However, a good writer uses the tools she has at her disposal, and Barr wields what she has very well.

The mystery in the book is what propels the story forward, but we never forget that we’re seeing it through Anna’s eyes. She’s always present, even during necessary chunks of exposition. And it’s fine, because she’s a great character to follow, whether she’s being a mediocre but proud waitress, grating when she’s called “older,” or being too independent for her own damn good.

Barr lingers just long enough in Anna’s waitress world to fill out the tension and detail a decent suspense story requires. As soon as Anna’s suspicions are sufficiently peaked, the story switches gears and she plummets into a heart of darkness, the likes of which she never expected in this difficult but relatively straightforward assignment. Were Anna not so finely drawn, her descent into peril and the malevolence she begins to think is contagious wouldn’t be nearly as affecting as it is.

Unfortunately, after the delicately constructed crescendo of the rest of the book, the end falls flat. The effort of 300 pages is wrapped up in 30, and many of those are of the “villains gratuitously brag about their stunning plan” variety. The climax doesn’t come entirely out of right field; some parts of the big reveal are foreshadowed or hinted at throughout the book. However, other parts came as too big a surprise to Anna and me alike. Of course, the path to the end of a mystery can’t be outlined in neon, but there were elements of the conclusion that didn’t fit. My inner detective, the Anna Pigeon that lives inside me and everyone else, wasn’t satisfied. As deft as Barr was with the clues, evidence, and minor details that fill the book, it was disappointing to see that some threads stopped short of the end of the tapestry.

High Country’s real pleasure turned out to be not the big finish but the race to get there. Inhabiting Anna’s head was riveting enough to keep me reading, and as the disappointment is quarantined at the end of the book, I wasn’t left feeling like I’d wasted my time. Besides, any book with such a great pun in the title is all right by me.

High Country, 336 pp, Putnam Pub available in local bookstores and libraries.

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