Like a reasonable response to climate change, Charlotte McConaghy’s two adult literary fiction novels are a blend of cataclysmic sadness and rage garnished with a dash of hope.
The first, “Migrations,” is about an emotionally devastated woman going to extravagant lengths to track the last birds on the planet on what may be their final migration. To follow the Arctic tern from Greenland to Antarctica, she talks her way aboard a commercial fishing vessel just before such vessels are outlawed. (The vessels are outlawed because the ocean is almost dead.) Having persuaded the crew that fish-eating birds will lead them to fish, they embark on their epic quest. Slowly and satisfyingly, the mysteries in her past are solved. Among other things, you’ll learn why she’s sad and why she was in prison.
The second, “Once There Were Wolves,” is about a woman leading an effort to repopulate Scotland with wolves. Once there are wolves, the entire ecosystem can rebound. As McConaghy says in this interview:
I knew I wanted the wolves in my novel to be just as interesting, just as impossible not to love. Not only are they amazing individually, but as a keystone species, wolves have amazing power over their environments; they have a trickle-down effect on every other species in their environment, as well as the plant life and water table — which is why we say wolves have the power to grow forests and move rivers. This means they are integral to their landscapes, and when hunted to extinction, the whole environment suffers their loss. Rewilding is about reclaiming a space that humans have altered, for the worse, and helping return it to its original state. To do this, wolves are ideal.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of sheep and cattle farmers that aren’t too keen on introducing a predator into their fenceless food factories. Even more unfortunately, she discovers one of the staunchest opponents of the effort eviscerated in what would appear to the untrained eye as a wolf attack.
But this novel is about more than a mysterious murder and how cool wolves are. Our hero also has a rare condition called mirror-touch synesthesia, which means when she sees something happening to a person or a wolf or a rabbit, she feels it. She also has a traumatized twin sister. And problematically, given she could be a suspect in the murder, a fling with the town sheriff. McConaghy repeats the trick of slowly and satisfyingly revealing the past as the story progresses. I don’t want to spoil it, and it wouldn’t sound cathartic presented here anyway, but I can’t help but say that near the novel’s end is an unforgettable scene that might cause sensitive readers to cheer and get teary at the same time.
These books are both devastating and a pleasure to read, but don’t take devastating to mean hopeless and with ultra-bleak endings. As the author says in another interview:
A way of writing out of despair, away from anger and into hope. I never want to leave readers feeling worse about the world than when they start a book, so I will always find my way to hope, and that’s very important to me, otherwise I don’t think there’d be much point in writing at all.
