In Field Notes from an Extinction, we meet Ignatius Green, an English scientist who has been dispatched to a rocky skerry off the northern tip of Ireland. Green’s job is to record the behaviour of a colony of great auk observed on this little island: in fact, to discover all he can about these birds before it is too late.
For the great auk has all but vanished from Earth, and Green wonders whether this remnant population might be protected, whether a final extinction of the species might be fended off. It is the spring of 1847, and on mainland Ireland – clearly visible across the sea – a catastrophe is unfolding.
Green is not a sympathetic character. He is a recognisable type: a Victorian scientist who only has eyes for the birds he is studying, and none for the human inhabitants who are in the way, and with whom he must nevertheless deal.
If they are starving, it is very likely their own feckless fault. Imagine his dismay, then, when he meets the supply boat sent across from Inishtrahull – to discover that most of the rations have been stolen by the island’s desperate inhabitants and, worst of all, a child, feral and very much unwanted, has been delivered instead.
READ MORE
From these ingredients, by turn bizarre, elemental and horrifying, Eoghan Walls crafts a compelling and convincing story of survival and apocalypse. The narrative device – Green’s ornithological journal, pressed into use as a chronicle of desperation – enables the story to be told in pared fashion, stripped of its flesh. The child screams her needs, so too does Green, while the great auks – a pair of whom are incubating a dead egg – observe and passively await their fate.
Green and the child will soon come to an understanding; this is foreshadowed, but the extremity of the context ensures that nothing cloying can flow from this sense of connection. And meanwhile, there is a cool measuring of empathy: will our hearts be broken more fully by the thought of starving humans, or by the portrait of a bird species clinging in vain to life?
But both humans and birds are the victims of systems and philosophies run amok – and even Green ultimately comes to recognise this brutal truth.
Neil Hegarty‘s novels are Inch Levels and The Jewel
