One man's migration

But out of it has come a beautifully quiet, beautifully solitary and beautifully reflective book. Fiennes introduces himself as a human bird of passage, making a migration of his own back out into the spaces of the world after a serious illness in his mid-twenties returned him to his own breeding ground, his parents' house. This could be an awful idea for a book; or, more likely, just an indifferent one, one of the endless supply of quest-shaped notions that are so often called upon to make travel writing seem personal and urgent. Fiennes, though, vindicates his notion, through some wonderfully tactful observation, and through the almost eerie lightness with which he settles in each of the human situations he traverses.

As the geese flap northward up the big sky of the prairies, for instance, Fiennes rides beneath on a Greyhound bus. Some of the time he is telling us about ornithological research into bird migration, and some of it, he is having his ear bent by the lady next to him, who is imparting her life story: how she was a nun for a while, how destiny directed her towards tennis instead, how she loves to do laundry. At meal stops, he wanders among bursting racks of snack possibilities, "Chex, Dots, Runts, Twizzlers, Munchos" piled high. At night, he records just how the neon roadside glow of America slides over the window glass and lights the sleeping faces of the travellers. It all amounts to a portrait of human nomadism to match the movement in the sky.

Typically, the portrait is quietly funny. But also typically, Fiennes isn't interested in harvesting quirkiness, that perennial source of quick colour for the travel writer. He listens to what people want to tell him in the same wide-eyed way that he scans lakes where the geese are resting: with a kind of birdwatcher's patience, effacing himself, making no sudden movements, content to search for phrases that do exact justice, whether to the Arctic light or to someone's style of speech.

People keep lending him their houses to stay in, and it's not surprising, he's such an ideal houseguest, so intelligently appreciative each time of being among the stuff that constitutes home for somebody. Fridge magnets shaped like pianos, glass jars filled with buttons, pillows shaped like angels' wings: these things all retain the tender weight they have in someone else's solution to the migratory urge. "House may creak," says a chirpy Post-It note in a cabin he borrows beside Hudson Bay. "Sits on tundra."

The Snow Geese is studded with constant, small perceptual triumphs. Bats pour from beneath a bridge in Texas with "the rapid soft flutter of banknotes hurrying through a counting machine". Up on Baffin Island, Fiennes's eyes can't cope with the disorienting dazzle, "the whiteness bundled like sheets and towels into a space too small to contain it all".

At his journey's end, his relationship with the geese becomes rather more carnivorous than he'd planned, but then the book's real emotional destination is a resolve he arrives at, a manifesto for migration. You have to yearn "forwards", he says. It's a declaration that bodes well for the career that begins so promisingly here.