William Fiennes: The Snow Geese

By SHONAGH LINDSAY

Reviewed by Shonagh Lindsay D OES travel have to have a purpose, and if so do travel writers sometimes assign arbitrary ones? I couldn't help asking myself this question when I picked up The Snow Geese, partly because it seemed such an unlikely choice of trip for a young British literati: to track the snow geese on their migratory journey north from winter quarters in Delaware, California and the Gulf of Mexico to their summer breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic.

Yet that question slipped away as I became immersed in Fiennes' marvellous adventure and a host of other British writer-explorers came to mind.

Most pertinent were Bruce Chatwin and Jonathan Raban, but particularly the latter whose book Badlands traces the historic journey of poor, mostly European, immigrants to America's vast prairie lands and out again as the prairies' inhospitable, almost uncultivable soils force them onwards.

A constant theme in both Snow Geese and Badlands is the nostalgic search for home - both the physical construction of, and imaginatively. Also, both books demonstrate an unwavering regard for their subjects.

In Fiennes' case this includes both geese and humans: the quixotic, pragmatic, good-natured creatures he comes across on the ground as well as the gravity-defying, determined birds that arc overhead.

Fiennes is a sweet-natured writer. His youthful feelings and vulnerabilities are candidly exposed, and his journey, which comes about because of a severe illness that makes him suddenly dependent on his parents, explores those permanent attachments and subtle residues of childhood as effectively as it does the urgency to leave them behind.

That's the human framework for a story densely filled with natural science, ornithology, geography and geology.

Cyclic in form, it begins with Fiennes reading Paul Gallico's Snow Goose in spring as he waits for his convalescence to end, then increases in momentum as he becomes infected with the same restless desire for different horizons as he imagines propels the birds he is now infatuated with.

By February he is flying to Houston, Texas, and from there trains, buses and small planes transport him until his journey ends six months later in the Arctic Circle's Baffin Island, where he only just manages to see the geese nesting in the island's open tundra.

Elegantly and wittily written, this debut book reminded me of how constant are the dual needs for change and continuity in our lives, linking us as intimately to the earth as are all its living things.

* Picador, $49.95

* Shonagh Lindsay is an Auckland researcher and writer