Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

But there won't be any more journeys after this one, no more oceans explored. And maybe that's why I'm filled with calm. My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless. I leave for no reason, just to be moving, and it breaks my heart a thousand times, a million. It's a relief to at last have a purpose. I wonder what it will feel like to stop. I wonder where we go, afterward, and if we are followed. I suspect we go nowhere, and become nothing, and the only thing that saddens me about this is the idea of never seeing Niall again. We are, all of us, given such a brief moment of time together, it hardly seems fair. But it's precious, and maybe it's enough, and maybe it's right that our bodies dissolve into the earth, giving our energy back to it, feeding the little creatures in the ground and giving nutrients to the soil, and maybe it's right that our consciousness rests. The thought is peaceful.

It is the near future and the earth is on the precipice of ecological collapse. Most animal species have gone or are going extinct: wolves, rhinoceroses, crows. Franny Stone is in Greenland, putting trackers on Arctic terns, one of the few species of bird remaining, and one of the most resilient. They travel from the Arctic to the Antarctic every year in search of food, the longest migration in the world. But the fish, too, are mostly gone, and so despite their resilience, the days of the Arctic terns are numbered, too. Franny, having no other way to track the terns, makes a deal with the captain of a fishing boat--someone who should be an enemy--telling him that if they follow the terns, the terns will bring them to fish. But Franny does not divulge that she's not associated with any university or research program; that she's following the terns for deeper and darker reasons.

I did not enjoy this book. The tone is poisonously, unceasingly serious, and the heroine seems cut from the cloth of television serials like Mare of Easttown--a woman whose self-destructive tendencies cause her to lash out, but who must learn to master her trauma. That's what this book is all about, TRAUMA in big capital letters. Interwoven with the story of the fishing boat, the Saghani, are bits of Franny's backstory, an endlessly unspooling narrative of trauma: an absent father, a disappeared mother, a habit of committing violence while sleepwalking, a tendency to run away for no reason, a stint in jail, a prickly disposition. All of this smaller traumas lead up to a bigger trauma that is only teased, although it's easy enough to fill in the blanks: Franny has, through an act of negligence, killed her researcher husband, and through this guilt she is driven to track the terns that were his own project.

I'd have to paraphrase it, but Charles Baxter described this kind of narrative in his book on fiction Burning Down the House, outlining a belief that the most important thing anyone can do in life, or in a story, is to find and name the source of one's trauma. It makes for dreary reading. On the other hand, there's an interesting thought at the heart of Migrations: that the traumas we receive on an individual level mirror the trauma we inflict on the earth. But Migrations is so wrapped up in the first kind of trauma that the second kind seems only partially fleshed out. Toward the end of the book, after a series of violent setbacks, only Franny and the captain of the Saghani are left out of the crew, and as they sail into the waters of Antarctica, the captain admits he is running, too, from a wife with a terminal illness who didn't want him to see her waste away. But why does anyone in the midst of ecological collapse need an excuse to act irrationally? Migrations struck me as a book about the end of the world that doesn't really think the end of the world is all that interesting.