Antarctic Navigation by Elizabeth Arthur

So here I was. My core body temperature was dropping; it was about zero, with a stiff wind blowing; I had a compound fracture and was severely snow-blind. It was late summer in the Antarctic, we were four hundred fifty miles from Framheim, and we didn't even have an HF radio. Moreover, even if we had, there would have been no way for our companions back at Cape Evans to assist us in any way that would matter much. For the moment, I was lying on my side, my tiny feet dangling over the lip of a crevasse, peering through slit eyes at the ice of the world's largest glacier. My country had just gone to war, my lover had left the Antarctic, and my life had just been saved by a man whom I had betrayed and lied to. If I could have thought anything at that instant, I would have thought that though there were many compass bearings, there was finally, in life, only one direction, and that was downwards.

Morgan Lamont dreams of Antarctica. A series of events in her childhood have produced this dream in here: being a child and sledding too far out in the Colorado foothills and making her way back on her own; seeing an intriguing sculpture by Robert Falcon Scott's widow Kathleen in her mother's art book. She becomes obsessed with Scott in particular, the "loser" in the competition to reach the South Pole, who not only was beaten there by Roald Amundsen, but who died on Ross Ice Shelf when a storm prevented his team from reaching their base on the Antarctic coast. But it's Scott, not Amundsen, who attracts Morgan's admiration, because while Amundsen was willing to do whatever it takes to reach the pole first, Scott was a kinder, gentler kind of explorer, one whose failure has often been attributed to his unwillingness to kill his sled dogs. Morgan's dream is to recreate Scott's expedition and prove that it could be done the way Scott imagined it.

Antarctic Navigation is a long novel. I'm trying to be better about how the length of novels affects my impression of them; I spend too much time thinking about how a novel ought to be: it ought to be longer, it ought to be shorter, whatever. But the size and scope of Antarctic Navigation surely come out of an experience of personal magnitude for author Elizabeth Arthur, who was the first laureate of the United States Antarctic Program's writer and artist residency. Can you imagine: six weeks at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, with no responsibility other than getting inspired? In her afterword, Arthur claims that her depiction of McMurdo--a fascistic outpost and a particularly American blight on the last great frontier--is not based on her experience there, but you can't help but wonder if the folks at the USAP felt like they didn't quite get the PR bump they were expecting. (It can't have been too bad, the program for 20+ years, up until the present moment, when COVID budget cuts seem to have threatened it.)

Most of Antarctic Navigation takes place in the regular, continental United States, faithfully recounting Morgan's childhood and the development of her interest in the Antarctic: her parents' troubled marriage, her sadistic scientist stepfather she calls "Dr. Jim," her aimless drift through a postgraduate education in history. Morgan grows up, makes friends, and you can pick up pretty quickly that each friend will be someone who takes part on the Ninety South Expedition to recreate Scott's footsteps. How lucky she was to have a friend who won the Iditarod, and a boyfriend who seems to be specially tuned to the magnetic poles of the earth! It reminded me of The Sparrow, another novel where a group of friends turn out to be just the right set of folks to make a journey to a newfound alien civilization, but here it seemed charming, rather than implausible, and rooted in the strength of Morgan as a character. Morgan's sudden discovery that she has a millionaire grandfather willing to bankroll the expedition is the silliest part, but Arthur does a good job of encouraging you not to squint too hard.

The journey, when it's finally underway, is a hell of an undertaking. It means living on the ice for two years, setting up an expedition base and living there through the Arctic winter so they'll be ready to journey out as soon as spring hits. The journey itself involves setting several enormous "depots" of supplies and food for the return journey, and sending a smaller team out from each depot. Arthur's descriptions of the Antarctic landscape are detailed and (I assume) faithfully rendered, though they lack some of the sense of alienness and wonder that I got from William T. Vollmann's Artic novel, The Rifles.

Arthur is more interested in Antarctica as a way to explore big ideas about science, about history, about geopolitics. The Ninety South expedition begins just before the outbreak of the Gulf War, which seems like a strange reference point, but one which Arthur makes much of: Morgan's interest in Antarctica is, at least in part, an attraction to a landscape that's been unspoiled by human greed and war. But as she learns at McMurdo, where oil spills and pollution are unpleasant truths, even this last frontier already bears the pressure of human evils. She has come to think of Scott as someone who sets out to the pole not to conquer, but to atone for what the British did to the world in the 19th and early 20th centuries; only once on the ice does she realize that as an American--and the beneficiary of her grandfather's lucrative contract with the Navy--that she is more like them than she thought.

The best part of the novel is right where you'd think it would be: when the expedition, having reached the South Pole and turned back to the coast, begins to go wrong. Disasters befall Morgan, one after the other, each one mostly the result of her own misjudgments, and she comes perilously close to imitating her idol Robert Falcon Scott's ignominious death as well. She survives (not a spoiler, I think, when you realize the book is written in the first person), but only by letting go of the idea that the expedition is her dream alone but something shared by the friends and loved ones in her expeditionary group, and with humanity at large. That sounds cheesy, but Arthur manages to make it convincing. Like Antarctica itself, Antarctic Navigation is enormous and daunting, but offers an opportunity for deep reflection on our place in the world.