THE SNOW GEESE

A vaguely eccentric journey on the trail of the snow goose, from British newcomer Fiennes (Granta, TLS, the London Review of Books, etc.).

Recovering from an unspecified illness at his childhood home outside Oxford, the 26-year-old Fiennes finds himself taken with the local birds, in particular with their freedom that contrasts so sharply with his bed-bound state. The snow goose, with which he had some bookish acquaintance in his youth, strikes his fancy. Longing to be free of his confinement, Fiennes experiences some of the bird’s migratory restlessness and when released hops a plane to Texas, where the snow goose winters. There, he begins his travels with the bird—a journey that will take him all the way to its Baffin Island breeding ground. As Fiennes haltingly pushes north, up through the Dakotas and Manitoba, past Churchill and the Hudson Bay to Foxe Land, he fills his story with the bulging bag of tricks birds use to get where they’re going: their grand circadian and circannual rhythms, their sun and stellar compasses, their sense of magnetic fields. The author has a tendency to overportray his human traveling companions, people he meets along the way (a woman on a bus, a family he stays with), who aren’t as interesting as the space they command, but he can turn a lovely phrase: when he pulls a book from the shelf, “the books on either side of it leaned together like hands in prayer,” and a heron lifts off, “its wings making the whup-whup of someone walking in a sarong.” Meantime, the farther afield Fiennes goes, the more his thoughts drift from migration to homesickness and nostalgia. “My journey north with the snow geese was not quite the shout of freedom I had presupposed,” he concludes rather rapidly, anxious to get home long before we really get to know him or understand the discomfiting melancholy he wears like a hair shirt.

Fiennes seems mightily preoccupied throughout his narrative, but he never articulates exactly with what. As a result, it’s difficult to get a grip on anything here, and The Snow Geese makes no lasting impact.