Migrations

“The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here.” So opens Charlotte McConaghy's debut adult novel, set in the near distant future. Our protagonist and narrator is a woman trying to make sense of a world gone mad and of her own self-destructive compulsion to wander. Abandoned early on by her father,  Franny Stone in turn abandons her mother when she wanders off at the age of 12. When she returns home, her mother is gone. Franny loves the wild spaces and the creatures that inhabit them, especially the birds and creatures of the sea. Over the years, as multiple species are driven to extinction by human greed, she undertakes one last migration of her own, to follow the only remaining flock of Arctic terns on their monumental annual journey from Greenland to Antarctica. She tags three birds during nesting season and then has to convince one of the disappearing number of fishing boats to take her south. She badgers Ennis Malone, captain of the Saghani, to take her onboard, against his better judgement and the opinion of his eccentric crew.  Franny promises that following the terns will lead them to the "Golden Catch" that has eluded them these last few years.

Franny's tortured history is revealed in flashback chapters and in her unsent letters to her ecology activist husband, Niall. But her obsession, now shared by Ennis, may be the undoing of them all. 

The book is rich in metaphor. For example, as The Guardian notes with regard to the terns' migration, "This journey is the longest migration undertaken by any animal – a complete crossing of the globe – and a feat that terns complete twice-yearly. The book uses this act of endurance, this instinctual movement, metaphorically: Franny too is driven to constant movement by forces she cannot control or understand, and is determined and driven even in the face of great adversity." They also comment on the thing I found most distracting,  the "book’s constant shuttling about in time, as well as the unreliability of Franny’s narration, the half-truths and silences with which she surrounds herself and everything she holds back from the other characters and the reader alike." If I were to re-read the book, I would keep a timeline of Franny's life on paper.

The New York Times chides that the novel veers into melodrama in the last half, but also concurs with my sense of how beautifully this book is written when they say, "this novel’s prose soars with its transporting descriptions of the planet’s landscapes and their dwindling inhabitants, and contains many wonderful meditations on our responsibilities to our earthly housemates."

 The Washington Post concludes, "In many ways, this is a story about grieving, an intimate tale of anguish set against the incalculable bereavements of climate change. There are many losses, but lives are also saved. Franny charts our course through a novel that is efficient and exciting, indicting but forgiving, and hard but ultimately hopeful."