Once, when the animals were going, really and truly and not just in warnings of dark futures but now, right now, in mass extinctions we could see and feel, I decided to follow a bird over an ocean. Maybe I was hoping it would lead me to where they’d all fled, all those of its kind, all the creatures we thought we’d killed. Maybe I thought I’d discover whatever cruel thing drove me to leave people and places and everything, always. Or maybe I was just hoping the bird’s final migration would show me a place to belong.
I was hoping to like Migrations more than I did; it took me so long to get a copy, and I had read so many excellent reviews about it, that I went into this sure it would be a slamdunk for me. I care about the planet and the creatures we share it with; l acknowledge that we humans have, and continue to, force other species into extinction and that, at a minimum, we should be talking about that more. But, ultimately, I don’t think that author Charlotte McConaghy does the cause much good with this novel: By using an unreliable narrator as a main character, a woman who seems to suffer from mental illness and whose thoughts and actions are unrelatable (to me, anyway), and by putting her in not-quite-credible situations, I poured too much energy into decoding McConaghy’s plot, leaving little left over to feel much for the themes (important as they are). Migrations is a slippery fish, and for the most part, it wriggled from my grasp. (Beware a potential spoiler in the next quote.)
Mam used to tell me to look for clues.
“The clues to what?” I asked the first time.
“To life. They’re hidden everywhere.”
I’ve been looking for them ever since, and they have led me here, to the boat I will spend the rest of my life aboard. Because one way or another, when I reach Antarctica and my migration is finished, I have decided to die.
(The above quote is from the first chapter, and as many reviews speak of this intention, and as unravelling the reason for this intention is a major thrust of the narrative, I don’t quite consider it a spoiler.) The basic plot: In a near-future where most of the world’s wildlife has died off, Franny Lynch is an amateur ornithologist (trained by her husband, Niall; a renowned professor of Biology), and having been entranced by Niall’s description of Arctic terns as the furthest migrating animals on the planet (travelling from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again annually), Franny decides to tag as many of the last known colony of terns in their Greenland nesting grounds as she can and then attempt to shadow them south. Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat (as the oceans are mostly depleted of fish, her assurance that the tagged birds will lead the boat to one last “Golden Catch” seems just bait enough to overcome the ship’s suspicious skipper and crew), and as Franny learns to make herself useful by tying sailor knots and swabbing decks, she must overcome her own disgust at associating with people who have made their living off of the industrial-scale taking of life. Interpersonal drama and other exciting events ensue.
Meanwhile, the timeline skitters around — we visit and revisit events from Franny’s childhood, how she met and fell in love with Niall, her more recent past — and it’s all mysterious, sad, and purposefully confusing. Franny is prone to nightmares, sleepwalking, and keeping secrets. The women in her family have a history of disappearing — some kind of genetic predisposition to migratory behaviour; just like the terns! — and as a lover of wild things, Niall is both attracted to the wildness in his wife and reluctant to cage her with his love. As the fishing boat heads ever southward, Franny’s entire life story is revealed and we, at long last, learn the true purpose of her project.
It seems to me, suddenly, that if it’s the end, really and truly, if you’re making the last migration not just of your life but of your entire species, you don’t stop sooner. Even when you’re tired and starved and hopeless. You go farther.
This seems like cautionary eco-lit, but despite mentioning that scientists are desperately trying to save the pollinators that sustain humanity’s food sources, there really isn’t much here about what would be negative (except for some people’s sadness) about a mass extinction event. Even a passing warning that people should book forest tours ASAP because the waiting list is about to outstrip the expected life of the last forests doesn’t have anything to say about how their impending loss might affect life on Earth. Really, this is Franny’s story — a woman so broken by family loss and abandonment that she can’t mentally endure the loss of one more animal species — and between choking up raven feathers in her dreams and slipping easily into frigid waters in every waking hour, I had a hard time understanding her; slowly unspooling her true history did add dramatic tension, but it did not help me connect with the character. And this is, at heart, a love story — but despite making clear that this was a biologist and an essentially wild thing being drawn to the only other person that each could ever hope to understand (or hope to be understood by), McConaghy didn’t convince me that this match could or would happen; why would the “migratory” Franny consent to an open-doored cage? Why would the Niall of the empty childhood and overtaxed present want someone who can’t promise to stay by his side? I wanted this to work for me, but it left me as empty as the lonely sea and sky.
