MIGRATIONS by Charlotte McConaghy

Franny Lynch suffers from compulsive wanderlust.  I don’t know if that’s a real affliction, but she can’t seem to stay in one place for long, abandoning loved ones without warning and without a thought of what impact her sudden absence might have on them.  An amateur ornithologist, Franny now wants to follow the migration of Arctic terns from Greenland to Antarctica via a fishing vessel.  The ensuing adventure, highly reminiscent of Moby Dick, is told alongside Franny’s past history.  This book, as well as being an adventure story, is also a love story and a warning on climate change.  Almost all animals, except insects, are extinct, so that a sighting of an owl or a school of fish is an event worthy of celebration.  The author’s imagined state of the planet is enough to render this book immensely sad, but her prose is so stunningly gorgeous that the result is a beautiful picture of the landscape, or rather the seascape mostly.  Franny herself is not a particularly endearing character (Why would someone concerned about the environment be smoking cigarettes?), but she is fearless, frequently diving naked into frigid waters, both literally and figuratively.  In fact, she dives into marriage to a man she barely knows and into the life of a deckhand with no experience whatsoever.  The boat’s captain allows her to join his crew, ostensibly since the terns will lead them to fishable waters.  Here again is another irony of the fact that Franny seems at times to be on the wrong side of her ecological principles, but I think these contradictions are intentional on the author’s part.  We are all part of the problem, making the solution that much more difficult to initiate.