Book Review: Migrations

We all have a semblance of migration within us — an inner wilderness yearning and beckoning us to go somewhere else and start anew — and we all have those intangibles that keep us tethered instead, mainly love, but other things, too. The contradiction of being human is to be counted on and to be free, and to find a freedom within the former. A partly unknown past besieged by grief coupled with that screaming wilderness demanding to be uncaged despite tethers of a kind (love) makes for one of the most interesting, heartbreaking protagonists I’ve encountered in some time in Franny Stone. She’s the main character of Charlotte McConaghy’s U.S. debut novel, 2020’s Migrations.

In Migrations, 80 percent of the world’s wildlife is gone due to human-caused climate change, but Franny, something of an amateur ornithologist, wants to follow the migrations of the Arctic tern. Of course, she has her own, personal reasons for such a mirror migration, but that’ll unfurl later. For now, we only know that Franny wants to join up with some salty sailors in Greenland and convince them to make the migratory trek all the way down to Antarctica. By following the birds and how they make the migration, the longest of any bird, maybe we can learn more about climate change. And interestingly, Franny’s pitch to the sailors is that the birds will help them catch more fish and make more money, an idea she abhors as someone trying to protect wildlife. More delicious thematic contradictions!

The Arctic tern’s migratory pattern is equivalent to flying nearly 19,000 miles, and when you consider their tiny stature and their lifespan of 30 years, that is quite remarkable and intriguing. On that level, I get the fascination and I am fascinated, but of course, McConaghy has way more going on here than birds. Niall, a professor in Ireland who is more misanthropic about climate change and the state of things (he considers humans a plague on nature), falls in love with Franny and she him. When they first meet, she can’t touch a dead bird … because it’s dead. Fast forward to the end of the book, she’s involved in an car accident while driving with Niall as a passenger, killing a woman in another vehicle and Niall. She must touch the woman to see if she’s still alive; she is until she’s not, and in the course of this — because the world is cruel, she reflects — she misses the fact that Niall has also perished. In the end, we all migrate to death alone, as the captain of the ship she’s on muses at one point (I think it was him). So it is, and so it was with Franny’s mother, who killed herself, even though Franny still “searches” for her, blaming herself for her mother’s death because she left, as she’s wont to do.

Because that’s what Franny does: she leaves, returning to the sea because it’s in her bones, and it is the sea she intends to make her final resting place after scattering Niall’s ashes with the wind of the Arctic terns. The middle portion of the book with Franny and the crew of the Saghani journeying to the Arctic — with a stop to go ashore for an injured crewmember, and then Franny gets sexually assaulted by an environmentalist protester and she violently defends herself, no less — felt like The Perfect Storm, but even more dystopian because these seafarers are searching for fish in an abandoned, apocalyptic-like ocean, chasing a few tiny birds hoping they’ll pinpoint salvation in the depths of said ocean.

So, when Franny and Ennis, the captain of the Saghani, make it to Antarctica at the end of the book, walking three days on the ice itself, their ship useless, and come upon a natural sanctuary of Arctic terns and fish and other creatures, it’s one of the most beautifully symphonic images (to use an apt word from Julia Fine’s blurb) to a book I’ve perhaps ever read. I wanted to cry; it was that moving and beautiful, and the beauty only intensified from there because Franny then jumped into the sea, like always, to go to her grave having achieved her migratory conclusion. Instead, she realizes, humans are not a plague on nature, but that we can be nurtures. That there is still hope. That there is still more to do. And so she rises from the sea and lives, the thumping of the wilderness that always seemed to lead her astray in love and life previously ensures her survival now.

I have goosebumps recounting it! What a darn book, McConaghy. I feel like I’m not doing all the potent, impressive thematic threads throughout the book justice, or the way in which McConaghy revealed each new thread, pulling on them little by little. The writing was poetic and often had me pause with an, “Ah,” to ponder it some more. For example, something Franny always struggled with was living in a world whose shape she couldn’t force into something manageable (paraphrasing a quote on the bottom of page 10). As it turns out, maybe migrating or staying tethered, going out to sea or staying ashore, isn’t about seeking a way to alter the shape of what we exist within, but finding the shapes we can’t bear to exist without.

Migrations is a beautiful ode to the contradictions within us at the deepest human level and how those contradictions both have the power to nurture and destroy ourselves, our relationships, other creatures, and the world itself. Therein is the human struggle, and while Franny hasn’t unraveled the code to solving the contradictions, I do believe she found her “shape” in the end and her place within it. She found a sense of home. Finally.

The shape of what McConaghy has rendered with her book will stay lodged in my brain for a long time to come.