Budge Burgess
Stories of polar exploration and survival are apt to locate themselves along a rigid, north-south axis – man versus the elements, heroism overcoming fear, the triumph of human endeavour over adversity. Jennifer Niven finds heroism aplenty in the disastrous, 1913 ‘Karluk’ voyage to the Arctic – not least in Bartlett, the ship’s captain, who sets out on a long trek to bring rescue for the survivors.
However, Niven doesn’t look for heroes. Though this is a tale of dark shapes on a white icescape, she is reluctant to brand anyone a villain, except, perhaps, Stephansson – the man who led the expedition but who fatally failed to organize it… and hastily abandoned it. Overall, she offers few moral judgements, preferring instead to search for balance and explanation.
This is an electrifying account. The narrative reads as enthrallingly as a good thriller – we are even left wondering who shot the dead sailor. Plot and expedition slowly unravel as the tiny shipbound society disintegrates.
Niven constructs an horrific image of survival. The failure of the ship’s engines proves an allegory for the absence of a cohesive driving force behind the expedition. Once the ship stops, they have no purpose other than to survive; their illusory unity disintegrates.
Trapped in inescapable ice floes, the woefully inadequate ship ‘Karluk’ awaits death. Around it, fissures of water open mockingly, then close like jaws. The ice cracks and drifts, carrying the vessel on unpredictable ocean currents. Like some sentient lunar landscape, the surface constantly re-sculpts and reforms itself, its chaos mirrored in the shambles of its human prisoners. Niven’s story animates both ice and men.
This is a difficult narrative to sustain. Thoroughly researched history can become sterile chronology, particularly when based on diaries. But what happens when, superimposed onto this rigid timeframe, the principal characters themselves gravitate into ill-disciplined factions? The writer is left with half a dozen simultaneous tales to tell, each straining like huskies to pull in different directions, in danger of casting the reader adrift, unsure which story to follow.
The seamen remain apart from the scientists, divided by a seminal class barrier. The white men remain distant from the ‘Eskimos’ hired for the expedition. Bit by bit, small groups cohere and drift apart, physically and socially. In the end, half a dozen parties are left striking out across the treacherous icescape, pursuing some chimerical safety on distant, rocky islands. The sled dogs fight, the seals and polar bears watch mutely.
The whites are inexperienced in Arctic conditions, and poorly equipped for their ordeal – they lack even adequate clothing. Wind and ice tear their boots and coats and morality. Disoriented men hobble on with blackened fingers and toes and hearts, joints swelling, eyes scorched by the cruel white glare. They are finally reduced to stealing food from one another. It is the three females on the voyage – an Eskimo woman and her young daughters – who emerge as heroic; tireless, resilient, practical, self-effacing, the children even retain their sense of fun.
It would be so easy to lose track of these various little knots of human society. Niven applies the skills of a scriptwriter, weaving together the subplots, and serving up an absorbing yet economic narrative, with many twists and turns. As the survivors face one dayless day after another… hour after monotonous hour… enduring the long Arctic night and interminable months of waiting, Niven keeps the drama tense, the characterisation convincing… and the atmosphere chilly.
Jennifer Niven maintains a tight control of this volatile tragedy. She writes with humanity, sympathy, and imagination, demonstrating that it is possible to breathe vivid life into the frozen hand of history, and to make credible and substantial its characters, their changing emotions and conflicting personalities. This is more than a ‘survival tale’ – it’s a rip-roaring, excellent book.