The Snow Geese

Spending a long time rehabilitating at home following a serious illness, in his confinement William Fiennes develops an interest in his father's hobby of bird watching, and rediscovers a book about a snow goose from his boarding school days. When finally his convalescence is complete, Fiennes is no longer interested in applying himself to his abandoned PhD, feeling the need instead to rediscover life through an adventure. Fascinated by the migration arc of snow geese and unable to shake the story of the snow goose from his mind, he embarks on a journey to follow the spring migration path of hundreds of thousands of geese from Eagle Lake in Texas to their nesting site at Baffin Island in NE Canada.

Although Fiennes' story is about show more following the journey of the snow geese, in reality the geese are more of a minor plot device to give purpose to his travelogue. They are a catharsis for rediscovering life after illness has stolen time and life choices from him, and as he journeys he muses also about home, what it has meant to him through his convalescence and what it will mean to him in the next turn of life.

I thoroughly enjoyed my armchair ride up through the States and deep into Canada with Fiennes. Most often his travels brought him through sleepy hollows and towns off the tourist beaten track, where the fascination was in the ordinary life stories of the local people he met and stayed with on his journey. These were places I've not been to - North and South Dakota, Riding Mountain National Park, Winnipeg, Churchill, Baffin Island - and whilst nothing of any great excitement happens on his travels, he evoked great feelings of wanderlust in me through his writing. There's a wonderful fascination that travelling out of your own normal and into the complete unknown of other people's lives and environments brings, and it is the ordinary conversations and observations which make this book so enjoyable.

As a first book it's not perfect. In early chapters at times he gets completely carried away with his physical descriptions of people he meets and places he stays, overdoing the detail in a way that feels amateurish and distracting. A few chapters in and he seems to get into his writing stride, writing quite beautifully at times, so I feel irritated that his editor didn't demand a rewrite on the rookie parts of his early chapters.

All things considered I enjoyed this quiet, gentle journey, and if you enjoy a good travelogue I'd recommend it.

4 stars - imperfect, but enjoyable nonetheless. show less

Drifts of specks appeared above the horizon ring. Each speck became a goose. Flocks were converging on the pond from every compass point, a diaspora in reverse, snow geese flying in loose Vs and Ws and long skeins that wavered like seaweed strands, each bird intent on the roost at the centre of the horizon's circumference. ... Sometimes whole flocks circled over the roost, thousands of geese swirling round and round, as if the pond were the mouth of a drain and these geese the whirlpool turning above it. (p. 27)

This was William Fiennes' first glimpse of snow geese, in Texas, as they began their spring migration to the Canadian tundra. While recovering from a serious health issue, Fiennes read a classic story from his childhood, Paul show more Gallico's The Snow Goose. This sparked an interest in birds, and a strong desire to see snow geese first-hand. He decided to travel from his native England to Texas, and follow the geese the full length of their spring migration. Although he expected to keep pace with the geese, sometimes he arrived at his next stage well ahead of the birds, who would stop traveling if weather conditions were less than ideal. For Fiennes, the journey was spiritual as well as physical. As the geese flew by the thousands to their northern breeding ground, Fiennes was on a path to emotional recovery, repairing a soul shaken by his illness. He found both solace and insight in those he met along the way. These included Eleanor, a Texas widow; Jean, a former tennis-playing nun; a man named David and his father-in-law, nicknamed "The Viking"; and a woman named Ruth whose generosity provided Fiennes with the renewal he needed to complete his journey.

Fiennes' prose is marvelous, especially when describing the natural world. As he moved from gulf coast to prairie to tundra, each stage was markedly different from the one before. Fiennes became expert at identifying different types of birds. His memoir digresses into passages about why birds migrate, and the paths taken by different species. I'm a bird geek, so I liked these segments. And as his trip progressed, Fiennes also explored concepts of nostalgia and homesickness. He particularly struggled when stuck in a remote outpost in advance of the geese, with everything around him completely unfamiliar. And yet, while being away increased his love for the house where he grew up, he also developed a deeper understanding of its importance, and how this understanding could help him to move forward with his life:
I had to turn my nostalgia inside-out, so that my love for the house, for the sense of belonging I experienced there, instilled not a constant desire to go back but a desire to find that sense of belonging, that security and happiness, in some other place, with some other person, or in some other mode of being. The yearning had to be forward-looking. You had to be homesick for somewhere you had not yet seen, nostalgic for things that had not yet happened. (p. 204)

This was a beautiful, moving book. Highly recommended. show less

The Snow Geese is an odd little book. The author William Fiennes, becomes fascinated with snow geese while he is recuperating from a long illness at his family home, and decides to follow the geese as they migrate across America.

I thought when I bought the book that The Snow Geese would be part memoir/part travel diary (a bit like Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson) but instead it was a book filled almost completely with tangents. Fiennes is a good writer and some of his descriptions are evocative and lovely but there doesn't seem to be a real central theme to the book. For me the most cohesive part of the book is at the very beginning where Fiennes is describing his illness, some of his school-days and his family home. For the show more rest of the time he doesn't talk about himself at all. He describes in detail the clothing of every person he meets and the conversations he has with them and the various places he stops in along the way but there were no real personal insights or the sense that he really learns anything meaningful on this epic journey through America.

Some of the chapters were devoted to facts and figures about birds which makes sense, but other pages were filled with statistics about railways and trains, volcanoes, and studies on homesickness which didn't seem to serve a purpose other than to meet a word-count.

I kept waiting for the 'great revelation' where Fiennes would pull together all these different stories, tangents, facts and figures to come up with some epiphany or overall message but it never came. He got to Baffin Island, saw the geese, ate a few of them and then couldn't wait to come home again.

All this isn't to say I didn't like the book; I did. It was a peaceful and relaxing read, and a nice reasonably informative story. I liked it enough to want to keep the book rather than put it back into a charity shop. I'm not sure if I will read it again but I'll keep it on the shelf just in case.

Overall rating: 3/5 stars show less

This was one of the most enjoyable books I have read in a while. The author, recovering form a long illness, travels from England to Texas to accompany the snow geese on their spring migration to the Arctic. Along the way he meets eccentric welcoming Americans, and he becomes homesick.He weaves his travels with those of the geese, and own feelings of homesickness and need to find a solid place .He includes explanations of some of the research on migration and six great pages on the nature of Common Swifts! I especially enjoyed the image of his father stepping outside to view the swifts in the evening.

A pleasant enough travel memoir about a young man, not a birder, who decides to follow the Snow Geese from Houston to Baffin Island. There are plenty of the requisite interesting acquaintances and plenty of nostalgia. Oh, and Zugunruhe, a lot of that.

This book was inspired by Fiennes read in of The Snow Goose when younger, and after a period in hospital, when he had a burning longing to return home to familiar and comforting surroundings. He wondered what drove the Snow goose to travel all across America, from Texas to Alaska.

Part travel book and part natural history, Fiennes follows the route that the geese take by coach, meeting a series of characters along the way. At each point that the geese move is determined by the conditions, so occasionally he gets ahead of them, and sees them arrive. In one location he is asked to house sit at one point by someone he has just met and goes out to the place where thy feed and watches them arrive.

It is a beautifully written book, and show more effortless to read. He successfully manages to link his longing to retuning home with the journey of the snow gooze and them instinctive drive to travel huge distances. Well worth reading. show less

I wanted to love this nonfiction book. A couple of my book buddies raved about it. The writing was good. The story was interesting - Fiennes, a Brit, becomes fascinated by snow geese and follows them on their migration from Texas to the northern wilds of Canada.

This read more like a novel - which, for this book, did not work for me. Fiennes seemed almost obsessed with the clothes of the people he encountered on his journey - lengthy descriptions of shirts and sweatshirts and hats and coats, which for the most part added nothing to the story.

He either has a knack for meeting unusual people or he embellished some of the characters. Everyone was folksy and funny and memorable.

I would rather have read more about the geese and less about the show more travels and the traveling companions. I'd be interested to read his book of fiction. show less