The Migration

Helen Marshall

New South Books

Otago Daily Times, June 1st 2019

Award-winning Canadian short-story writer, poet and medievalist Helen Marshall’s biography describes her work as bringing the past into conversation with the present, exploring the interrelationships between history, myth, tradition and the nature of childhood, life and death. Her debut novel reflects these themes, whose disturbing and thought-provoking nature is evident from its very first lines. “When I was young, I used to play dead. That was back before I knew what dead meant – what it really meant.”

Sophie Perella is 17 and in her last year of high school in Ontario when her sister Kira comes down with juvenile idiopathic immunodeficiency syndrome (JI2), an illness of unknown aetiology that affects only pre and peri-adolescent children with symptoms including fatigue, seizures, mood swings and suicidal impulsiveness. With no known cause or cure, health authorities have made cremation of all those who die with JI2 mandatory in an attempt to contain its spread, and scientists around the world are mobilised to study the disease.

One of the foremost JI2 research and therapy centres is situated at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital, where the girls’ Aunt Irene, a professor of historical epidemiology, is an affiliate researcher, and they move from Canada to Britain so that Kira can attend outpatient clinics there. But they arrive during the worst floods in recorded history, and she drowns in a flooded river soon afterwards, the sort of fatal accidental all too common among JI2 patients. With rumours circulating that the deceased regain motor function days or weeks after death, a phenomenon known as the Lazarus reflex, Sophie is tormented by the thought her sister might be burned alive and steals the body, watching over its transformation into something strange, beautiful and utterly unearthly. Then she, too, falls ill and is faced with the most difficult decision of her life; follow Kira into transcendence, or accept an experimental treatment that may or may not prevent the change.

Although The Migration bears all the hallmarks of YA fiction – in addition to dealing with her sister’s death and uncertain of her own future, Sophie must also navigate the complications of first love, the dissolution of her parent’s marriage, and the realisation that the adults in her life are as scared and vulnerable as she is – it is clearly intended for a broader audience. The epidemic coincides with a global escalation in climatic extremes that parallels those seen at the height of the Black Death and may be an adaptation to environmental stress that only the young have the flexibility to acquire. When this scientifically speculative (but not impossible) explanation is combined with repeated allusions to the biblical nature of events, Marshall’s message is only too clear: our children’s future requires an entirely different way of being in the world, a transition as dramatic as that from the Dark Ages to Enlightenment. (The novel gains additional, if unintended, relevance from reports that scientists have recently managed to partially resurrect dead neurons for the first time, making the question of what survives brain death more than abstract speculation.)

Whilst I might keep The Migration for myself, its metaphorical exploration of an all-too-literal crisis is both original and strangely lovely in execution, and I will undoubtedly re-borrow it from my daughter’s bookshelf.