The Snow Geese

Introduction

My favourite pages of this remarkable book have nothing to do with geese. They happen in a diner in South Dakota called Dally’s, which serves its coffee from a ‘stainless steel Bunn-O-Matic urn’, and houses its cinnamon rolls under ‘scuffed Perspex domes’. Stuck in Dakota for a week, the narrator becomes a regular at Dally’s. It’s where he waits, and it’s where he watches: the ‘slow-turning window fans’; the customers putting their shoulders to the ‘surprisingly heavy’ glass front door, then taking their seats at the ‘red leatherette booths, sprung like mattresses’; and the two waitresses in their twenties, Misti and Crystal, who keep the place ship-shape:

William Fiennes’s careful account of their work is itself a form of ‘tenderness’. He observes what most would miss: the dignity of duty done well, the consolations of habit, and the tiny perk of the milkshake dregs. Two young people on low-wage service jobs are given the same generous attention as the 250,000 snow geese he has recently seen on a lake of white ice.

Fiennes’s prose has been compared to that of Bruce Chatwin, but here is Chatwin killing time in a restaurant in Patagonia:

Chatwin’s looking is of a different order to Fiennes’s. It’s hard, itemizing, scrutinizing. Everything is surface – the ‘shield’ of the Indian’s ‘face’, the ‘plastic’ of the jugs, the nails of the ‘blonde’. Object and human are equally of disinterest. No attempt is made to enter the inner life of place or people. Chatwin jots down and then he gets out. His noticing of detail is acquisitive, where Fiennes’s is inquisitive.

The distinction is important – because
The Snow Geese
is above all a book about learning to see, and it is a book that changes the vision of its readers. We end it more attentive, not only in that the natural world is left freshly scintillated for us, but also because our ethical sense is subtly shifted. Pure description is a relatively simple trick for a writer: you scribble details down in the Moleskine, then line them all up on the page afterwards. Far more difficult is fusing these details with radiance and ethos. Fiennes’s attentiveness is so thorough-going and compassionate that it is, you soon begin to realize, ‘less a technique than a moral principle’.

That last phrase is Fiennes’s own, used by him in admiration of Joseph Mitchell, author of the classic
McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon
(1943) and
Joe Gould’s Secret
(1965). Mitchell’s subject was New York: its buildings and streets, its people, the sea that washed its edges, and the language that torrented through it. He hung out at the bars and docks of Manhattan Island, listening and looking. Everyday life consistently fascinated Mitchell. He believed, like his editor at the
New Yorker
Harold Ross, that it was possible ‘to write history about living people’, and he did so by lending those people his ear and letting them speak.

There is much of Mitchell in Fiennes. He sets out to write mostly about geese, but ends up writing mostly about the folk he encounters along the way. You’ll meet them yourselves soon: Eleanor, who collects tortoises; ‘The Viking’, who is ‘troubled by the attentions of widows’; Sam, who trains for a year to swim across a river mouth near the Arctic circle, and hears the submarine calls of beluga whales when he does. Gentle in manner, curious but unprying, Fiennes inspires candour in others. On an overnight Greyhound bus, he ends up sitting next to a chatty fellow passenger called Jean. Where others would have turned a shoulder or put their headphones in to discourage conversation, Fiennes indicates his readiness to listen. As the highway signs flit by and the hours tick past, Jean’s extraordinary life-story unfolds into that well-intentioned space.

Night buses, cars, train-carriages, roadside diners, airports, motel and hotel rooms:
The Snow Geese
can at times seem less a work of travel writing than one of transit writing. The cultural theorist Marc Augé influentially named such locations ‘nonplaces’ (
non-lieux
), and noted the power of these ‘transport zones’ and ‘temporary abodes’ to elide individual identities and histories. But to Fiennes such sites are as rich and strange as New Delhi or Angkor Wat, teeming with anecdotes and oddity. His accounts of them gleam with bright vignettes: the boy in the bus station at Oklahoma City who ‘gazed up at a wall of gunmetal luggage lockers in three sizes . . . and then went right along the bottom row, trying . . . the largest lockers’, until he found an open one, climbed into it and ‘pulled the door shut behind him’; or the man who walks with ‘an almighty crash’ through the glass front door of Dally’s, which has been polished to invisibility by the conscientious Crystal.

I still remember reading the first page of
The Snow Geese
for the first time, twelve years ago, in a pre-publication proof copy. Within a paragraph, I knew something rare was underway. An eerie clarity of vision stole over me. The world being described was lucid, but refracted. I could
see
the female golfers practising at the hotel driving range, their ‘hair furled in chignons that poked through openings at the rear of their baseball caps’, and their ‘sleek, tanned calves’ like ‘fresh tench attached to the backs of their shins’. Calves like fresh tench? What a high-risk simile that is, especially so early in the book! How easy it would be to get the comparison slightly askew – and lose the reader’s trust from the off. But it is brilliant, and its brilliance lies in its visual exactness (the shiny taper of the fish-backs mimicking the over-developed musculature), and in its sly hint of absurdity (for professional golf is, really, a ridiculous activity). Those tenched muscles are soon followed by other finely exact images: the golfers drawing ‘clubs from the bags with the nonchalance of archers’, the books that ‘lean together like hands in prayer’ when the narrator pulls a copy of
The Snow Goose
from between them.

More is at work in those clever opening paragraphs, though, than the establishment of a style. They also set in motion images that will return through the book. When Fiennes describes the ‘rinsed golf balls’ flying out from the tees and ‘soaring high above . . . the fairway’, it is the first of many parabolas of flight that will occur in the book: the migratory ‘arc’ of the geese themselves, of course, but also the howitzer-hurl of the potatoes that he and Sam will fire out over Hudson Bay, laughing for joy at the fun of it. The arc of the golf balls finds its first rhyme only a few sentences later, in fact, with the suspension bridge depicted in a colour print on the hotel library wall. The bridge is ‘rigged like a harp, with staunch arched piers and high support towers lifting the curve of the main cables’ – and the bridge’s ‘harp’ will itself re-appear as Eleanor’s brooch, ‘a gold harp with four short strings’, a chapter later.

This subtle weft of imagery is part of the art of
The Snow Geese
. Objects are allowed to be themselves, but they are also involved in larger symbolic patterns. The two great urges of the book – the urge to move on and the urge to return home – resound into its details. Midway through reading the book, everything and everyone seems somehow charged by these competing impulses: Matthew proudly showing Fiennes the house he is constructing at the foot of a radio mast (copies of
Fine Homebuilding
magazine strewn about the tent he sleeps in on-site); Marshall taking the Muskeg Express up into the Arctic nineteen times ‘just for the ride’, and teaching Fiennes the mnemonic for the names of the Great Lakes (‘Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. Spells
HOMES
’); and of course Fiennes’s own lovingly particular memories of the ‘ironstone’ house he grew up in, recalled in steadfast prose, with proper nouns counter-sunk deep into the sentences. Meanwhile, above and through all of these incidents fly the geese, compelled by instinct on their vast annual commutes from feeding grounds to breeding grounds. The set-piece scenes in which Fiennes evokes their arrivals and departures are the most linguistically gluttonous passages in the book, gloriously gorged with relish for lexis: the ‘halliard yammer’ of the wings, the ‘turd squalls’ that sweep the ground beneath them, and the ‘wild lung-top gabble’ of their massed cries.

However much the narrator watches the geese, though, and however many words he lavishes on them, they remain mysterious to him. Binoculars bring the birds close optically, but not emotionally. They are the cause and rhythm of his journey, but following them for thousands of miles leads Fiennes to a finer understanding of himself, rather than of the geese. For this is a book about how nature provides us not only with ‘ecosystem services’, but also with self-perception, metaphor and new forms of imagination. Repeatedly, deftly, human beings are given avian characteristics: a man has eyes ‘like two small birds’; Eleanor sits on her tree-height balcony because ‘it feels like a nest’, and when she smiles the ‘crow’s feet’ at her eye edge wrinkle into sight. These are tiny migrations of language from one realm to another: bird-words that cross boundaries.

Here and there Fiennes allows the analogy between birds and words to take gorgeous flight. He writes of the ornithologist Stephen Emlen, who devised a superbly simple experiment in order to test the migratory instinct of indigo buntings when deprived of environmental stimuli. Emlen confined buntings ‘in migratory condition’ to special circular cages, in the centres of which he placed funnels of blotting paper mounted on ink pads. The buntings, stirred by the need to travel but unable to do so, would hop onto the funnels before sliding back, with each hop leaving a black print on the paper. In this manner, as Fiennes puts it, ‘the buntings kept diaries: footprints lettered their seasonal restlessness’.
The Snow Geese
is Fiennes’s migration diary – the lettering of his restlessness. Very late in the book, he is out on a skidoo with two Inuit hunters in the frozen land near Andrew Gordon Bay. Disoriented by the whiteness of the tundra, Fiennes briefly loses perspective and reference, such that ‘for a moment it was as if we were travelling across the middle of a page, with whiteness and black markings all around us, and geese lifting off the snow like letters becoming unstuck’. Letters are unsticking, writing is reaching its limits – and this exceptionally beautiful book is close to its end.

R
OBERT
M
ACFARLANE

FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER