Every year, Arctic Terns (Sterna paradisaea) complete the longest known migration of any species—between the earth’s poles, from their Arctic breeding grounds to the Antarctic and back again, an average annual journey of 88,916 kilometres (55,250 miles). In a typical arctic tern’s lifespan (which can be over 30 years), they will have travelled the equivalent of “66 times around the Earth or three round trip flights to the Moon”.

This epic journey along the earth’s curve forms the narrative arc of Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations—a novel so devastating I almost wished I hadn’t read it. Almost, but not quite, as the story and its central character have nested themselves in my heart and mind in a deeply meaningful and inspiring way.

Set in a grim not-too-distant future in which Rachel Carson’s silent spring is not a warning parable but a haunting and dangerous reality, the novel follows protagonist and anti-hero Franny Stone, an astonishingly broken and incredibly strong woman with a steely will and remarkably high pain threshold.  She is also an extreme sleepwalker, propelled by a mysterious internal force of wildness, wandering, and endless grief.

The novel draws parallels between personal and ecological grieving, as Franny goes to extreme lengths (physically and geographically) to work through her mourning by following the Earth’s last remaining flock of arctic terns on its arduous global migration, made more treacherous and precarious by the catastrophic global decline in fish as well as the dangers of the cold Atlantic Ocean, described in biting detail by McConaghy.

The text is rich in descriptive language, vividly painting visual and sensuous experience. Several times in the novel Franny plunges into polar water at subzero temperatures:

I plunge into the fjord and—
Oh.
Out flies my soul, sucked through my pores.
The cold is familiar and savage. For a moment it grips me and forces me into a cell […]
Clarity returns with a punch to the lungs.  (8-9)

In another passage, McConaghy describes anxiety as a sensation: “Panic sets in, silver eddies over my skin as light moves upon the iridescent scales of a fish” (206). These moments remain with me almost as if I had experienced them myself.

There is a certain amount of foreshadowing in poor Franny’s lonely childhood, when her only friends are a murder of crows whom she befriends in a reciprocal relationship of gift giving. The plot of the novel proceeds to unfold a bit like a mystery, with hints and clues about darkness and tragedy in Franny’s life that ultimately lead to a devastating revelation towards the story’s end.

As I was writing this, I heard a disturbing news report about an update to the “doomsday clock”: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists released its 2021 Doomsday Clock Announcement on January 27, 2021, explaining its declaration of 2020 as being the closest to midnight (apocalypse) since the symbolic clock’s inception in 1947. The Bulletin’s website states:

This is your COVID wake-up call: It is 100 seconds to midnight

Human beings can manage the dangers posed by modern technology, even in times of crisis. But if humanity is to avoid an existential catastrophe—one that would dwarf anything it has yet seen—national leaders must do a far better job of countering disinformation, heeding science, and cooperating to diminish global risks.

In her explanation of this statement, Bulletin President and CEO Dr. Rachel Bronson highlighted the dangers of the erosion of science and the denial of threats posed by climate change and the coronavirus.  McConaghy’s novel offers a glimpse of a possible future resulting from inaction on the issues described by Dr. Bronson and the Bulletin. It is bleak and scary.

And yet, despite the pain and dread and ruin experienced by Franny Stone, the novel also shows us her incredible resilience, her will to survive, and the small but tenacious embers of love and hope that fuel her existence and her work to protect the world and the birds that she loves. As Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and others remind us, grief and love are inextricable. In “Starlings in Winter,” Mary Oliver writes:

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

[…]

I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.