THE SNOW GEESE
by William Fiennes
Picador £14.99
ISBN: 0330375784

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Books about birds have a resonance for me. A childhood spent in damp and insalubrious environments - freezing reservoirs, toppling cliff-tops, smelly sewerage farms - with binoculars at the ready has bestowed on me one of those gifts which, as the late Iris Murdoch might have said, is the greater for being pointless: I can recognise and name, without consciously registering them, most British birds. To read William Fiennes's THE SNOW GEESE, an account of one man's pilgrimage across the Americas tracking the migration of the snow geese who breed far up in the Arctic north, was therefore a special pleasure.

I am also drawn to books which take their impulse from other books. For many people the original SNOW GOOSE by Paul Gallico remains a kind of icon. For all its feyness and sentimentality (or, perhaps, because of those very factors?) that slender book strikes some weird archetypal chord. Fiennes is generous in acknowledging his debt to the original SNOW GOOSE's role in his own imaginal life, Indeed, a generosity of spirit is one of this books most attractive features, both in what is described and what one infers about the author.

Although the book is ostensibly about the snow geese and full of fascinating insights into these graceful and evocative birds (e.g. "The term 'aurora borealis' was introduced by the French astronomer, Pierre Gassendi, form the Latin 'aurora' (dawn) and 'borealis' (north). Boreas was the god of the north wind in Greek mythology; the original scientific name for snow goose was 'Anser Hypoborea': 'goose from beyond the north wind'") it is the vehicle for many other observations. Many of these are about the characters Feinnes meets and communes with on his journey. For me, though, none of these people, entertaining as they often were, had as much appeal as the author himself. I found myself wanting to hear more about him. What, for instance was the mysterious illness that laid him so low which led him to take up an interest in birds comparatively late in life?

Illness, in fact, is an important strand of this multi-stranded book. One of the threads in that particular strand is the discussion of homesickness. As a psychologist I am interested that there is almost no literature on this topic and though there must be other books which deal with the subject this is the only one I can recall having read. "In 1668 a Swiss physician, Mulhausen, proposed that it be known by the term 'nostalgia' a word he had constructed from the Greek 'nostos' - meaning return, and 'algos' meaning suffering 'so that... it is possible from the force of the sound "nostalgia" to define the sad mood originating for the desire to return to one's native land.'" Fiennes' discourse on homesickness is prompted by his sojourn in hospital - for the sickness from which was born his desire to track the geese; and this in turn is linked to Homer's 'Odyssey' and the wandering hero's own sojourn with the seductive nymph Calypso (one of the great passages in all literature for it is here that Odysseus's nostalgia recollects not just Ithaca, but also his faithful wife Penelope, whose human charms, so seemingly inferior to those of the nymph who holds him captive, are nevertheless ultimately what compels the hero's return.)

It is this kind of playful interweaving of multifaceted detail which makes for the book's charm. But for me, finally, it was the birds which held me most in thrall. I found I was skipping through the human encounters to get back to the fascinating information about migration. For example: 'In the 1950s the German ornithologist Franz Sauer suggested that birds might refer to the stars to determine their migratory direction.' Another ornithologist studying buntings placed them in circular cages so that only the sky was visible to their eyes. He learned that 'a bunting in a migratory condition -' (I liked that - was Odysseus in a 'migratory condition'? I wondered) '- stands in one place or turns slowly in a circle, its bill tilted upward and its wings partly spread and quivering rapidly..' This ornithologist cunningly inked the birds' feet and placed blotting paper in their cages. Alas, they didn't write 'The Odyssey' but their inky footprints revealed that in the autumn they hopped south, while in spring the Bunting tendency was to hop north - the conclusion being that, in the absence of alternative information, they must take their migratory data from the night sky.

Hurrah for the buntings and the snow geese and their brilliant untutored navigation skills; hurrah for the ornithologists who study them simply because they are there and make up part of one of life's still-to-be-solved (and let us be glad of this too) mysteries; hurrah for people like William Fiennes who follow their fascinations simply because they are fascinated by them and not for thought of any tangible profit thereby. I hope he makes a tidy sum with this book, though - he deserves to.

© Salley Vickers

This reveiw appeared in the Independent Sat 23 March 2002

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