She’s also a prisoner of her own tragedies and the memories that linger, and as the narrative follows the Saghani’s journey south, it weaves through Franny’s intriguing and often troubled past.īorn in Australia to an Irish mother, Franny has always been a wanderer, driven by abandonment and neglect as well as by the feeling that she doesn’t quite belong. She can swim in subzero waters, hold her own with hard-drinking sailors, and meets the crew’s rigorous demands in her pursuit of the terns. The ways in which these losses are both part of the main narrative as well as woven in more subtly throughout is effective and haunting.įranny Stone is at once fragile and as tough as they come. Migrations is the best type of environmental fiction in that it shows us, in eloquent and vivid prose, what is at stake and how the world will change once the animals are lost. I regret coming here, to where it should be more alive than anywhere. The bears and wolves went long ago, already too few to survive the inevitable … There is no birdsong as I walk among the trees and it is catastrophically wrong. In Yellowstone, six years earlier, “The deer have all died. This terrible new world is rendered all the more poignant as the novel moves back and forth in time, in both the narrative and its extinction spectrum: In one flashback, a lone gray wolf is discovered in Alaksa, and at one point in the Saghani’s journey, commercial fishing is outlawed, ostensibly to save the last few remaining fish in the oceans. The big cats of the savannas haven’t been seen in years … There are no bears in the once-frozen north, or reptiles in the too-hot south, and the last known wolf in the world died in captivity last winter.”

Every so often, we’re reminded of the way the world has changed: “There are no more monkeys in the world, no chimps or apes or gorillas, nor indeed any animal that once lived in rain forests. While Migrations may be described as dystopian fiction, it is on the very edge, and it’s a brilliant spot: It has the feel of a contemporary novel, set during a time at which the world is still recognizable, only it’s not.

The oceans’ fish, like all other wildlife on the planet, are disappearing or already gone. She manages to persuade Ennis Malone to let her join the crew of the Saghani by telling him that she, via the terns, will show him where the fish are. Migrations is a stunningly beautiful novel about a woman who has always been running-from her childhood, her mistakes, her memories-and this time, she’s traveling from Greenland to Antarctica, following the world’s last flock of Arctic terns on their final migration.Īs the novel opens, Franny Stone approaches the captain of the only boat who might still take her onboard to follow the terns.

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy