The Snow Geese: A Story of Home

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

William Fiennes is an Englishman who, while recuperating from an
extended illness, found a copy of The Snow Goose, a charming if
sentimental story by Paul Gallico that had been read to him at school.
He became fascinated by the birds and their patterns of migration, and
when he recovered decided to follow their journey from their wintering
place in Texas to their breeding grounds on Foxe Land in present-day
Nunavut. The birds become an obsession. He follows them by bus
(Greyhound), by train (the muskeg-express to Churchill, Manitoba), by
small plane (to Cape Dorset)—and reports on all he sees.

He is continually waiting, for the weather to become suitable and for
the geese to move on, and much of his book consists of descriptions of
places—and especially of people. He also intersperses his narrative
with laymen’s explanations of migration and thoughts about nostalgia,
homesickness, and home. His, then, is a sentimental and therapeutic as
well as ornithological journey.

Fiennes has a good eye, and a gift for evocative and economic phrasing:
the front ends of the transcontinental coaches sink “on hydraulic
mechanisms to the kerb, like camels kneeling,” while dog teams on the
ice on Baffin island are “doodles on a blank page.” The colorful
characters he encounters en route—an ex-nun with a passion for
laundry, an “almost spherical” man with an obsession for
train-travel—are vividly presented. Yet the parts never quite cohere.
All Fiennes does is watch the geese—except for the expedition to Foxe
Land where he has to eat one. The geese journey home, and so eventually
does Fiennes himself. His obsession with geese connects, indirectly,
with the very different obsessions of the people he meets. But
bird-lovers, the most likely people to find and read his account, will
probably get impatient with the intervening parts. This is an unusual
book by a gifted writer, but at the end I felt dissatisfied. At the same
time, however, I suspect that parts of it may well haunt my memory.