Migrations: A Novel

Amazing

今年読んだ本で一番良かったかもしれない。美しい表現がちりばめられている。急いで読む本ではない。その瞬間その瞬間を切り取った表現は何度読み直しても心に響く。海外では読書会の本でも取り上げられるほど。

Read for our book club. Looking forward to our group discussion.

Migrations, Charlotte McConaghy, 2020Imagine a time, in the not too distant future, a dystopia where the oceans have been emptied of most life by climate change, acidic water and overfishing. Imagine a future where most bird species have gone extinct due to pesticides and environmental degradation. This is the premise by this first novel by Australian writer, Charlotte McConaghy. The novel begins on the coast of Greenland where a woman Franny Lynch is capturing and attaching GPS locators on some of the last surviving group of Artic Terns. Artic Terns are a bird species which embarks each year on the longest annual migration of any species. It is a journey of over 9000 miles each way from Greenland to Antarctica.It becomes apparent that this woman has an obsession; she wants to track and follow these Artic Terns on their migration. In order to do this she has to convince the captain of the last remaining fishing boat in Greenland to take her on this long and dangerous journey to Antarctica. Will the Terns lead the boat to the last remaining schools of herring? Why is this woman so obsessed and what is her purpose? This is the premise and over the course of the novel we follow her, captain Ennis and the crew of “Saghani” on an epic troubled journey to the far extremes of the globe.The book is also a story of the protagonist’s own life journey and migrations. Interspersed between the oceanic adventure are many flashbacks to Franny’s somewhat emotionally fractured life and her search for meaning in a world being degraded and destroyed by greed and despoliation. This is also a story of the beauty and love of birds and the profound loss it would be to all our lives if they no longer existed. Franny’s husband Niall is an Ornithologist studying and trying to save the last surviving species of birds. Together two souls distraught about the ecological destruction around them, trying to save what they can, facing a bleak future where mankind is alone in a desert of his own making.In a sense this novel is in the category of dystopian writing such as Cormack McCarthy’s “The Road”. It is also a very beautifully written emotional piece about a person trying to discover their identity, their place in the world and their purpose. The Artic Terns know this instinctually, they know where they are going each year on their migration and regardless of the risk and pain they persist. This in essence is the story of a woman who persists. As Keats said; “do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul”. This is also a story that can also be interpreted as a warning about the current course of humankind and the price we may well pay for our greed and negligence. We will indeed be all poorer. JACK

Heart felt