The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett

Surrounded by that ice and snow, Erasmus dreamed of home--less and less often, though, as the brig passed down Lancaster Sound. Around him were breeding gulls and terns, snow geese and murres, eiders and dovekies; the water thick with whales and seals and scattered plates of floe ice; a sky from which birds dropped like arrows, piercing the water's skin. Sometimes narwhals tusked through the skin from the other side, as if sniffing the solitary ship. They hadn't seen another ship since passing a few whalers at Pond's Bay, yet Erasmus was far from lonely. Dazzled, he looked at the cliffs, and knew Dr. Boerhaave shared his dazzlement.

I love the Arctic. I'll probably never go there. Few people do. But I like reading about it, probably because it is so improbable: remote, harsh, difficult to access and inimical to comfort, the Arctic retains something of the feeling of the old frontier. No wonder that, in the 19th century, once the world had been more or less mapped, those who had explorers' hearts and minds turned to the Arctic; and for once they were pretty roundly defeated. Some of the Arctic's mystique, actually, comes from the fact that there are people who make it their home, and live lives of remarkable resilience there, not just against harsh conditions, but against the predations of people who think they know better. So it's a joy to read about, whether in The Rifles by William T. Vollmann, who was defeated by the Arctic like his alter ego John Franklin, or in Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, a guy who knows more about the Arctic and its residents because he affords them a bit of basic respect.

Andrea Barrett's The Voyage of the Narwhal is a fiction book about an Arctic voyage gone, as all of them go, wrong. Its protagonist is Erasmus Wells, a middle-aged naturalist who signs on under Zeke Voorhees, a younger man and Erasmus' old friend. Zeke turns out to be a bad captain: he cares more about his own ambitions than the safety of his crew, and this ambition, mixed with a mercurial temper and plain poor judgment, leads to the Narwhal becoming stuck in pack ice. Like, they suspect--and we now know--the doomed Franklin expedition, of which the Narwhal is searching for evidence. Zeke's heedlessness kills, perhaps indirectly, several members of the voyage, and when the crew refuses to go on an ill-advised sledge excursion, Zeke goes by himself. When he fails to return, Erasmus takes the only opportunity to get out of the pack ice--lest they be frozen in for another year--leaving Zeke for dead.

That's all all right. I wouldn't say that Barrett has the knack for describing these alien landscapes like Vollmann and Lopez. Far more interesting, I thought, was what happens when Erasmus returns to Philadelphia. As it turns out, Elisha Kent Kane's Arctic voyage returned just before the crew of the Narwhal, having mapped first every bit of coastline the Narwhal thought they'd discovered. Erasmus returns basically empty-handed, and while Kane tours the country with tales of his exploits, Erasmus is either forgotten or loathed for having abandoned Zeke.

All this gets worse when, as any reader surely expects, Zeke shows up again, this time with an Greenlandic woman and her son in tow. According to Zeke's rendition, the pair have accompanied him voluntarily, but Erasmus suspects that there has been some coercion involved; that Zeke knew his only chance at notoriety was to bring back real life "Esquimaux." I wonder if Barrett was thinking of the Inuit woman and her son that caused such a stir in London. Like that real-life pair, Zeke's Greenlanders--Annie and Tom--grow quickly sick in the unfamiliar climate, and Zeke treats them shabbily, as curios to be shuffled onto the stage and then crammed in a drawer when not in use. Annie dies. Erasmus, working doggedly on a natural history of the Arctic--a book that lies in contrast to the dazzling half-truths of Kane and Zeke--decides that he must right Zeke's wrongs, and steals away on one final voyage to the Arctic, to return Tom to his family.

So there's a whiff of white saviorism to Erasmus' noble deed. But there's also a powerful critique of the way that natural philosophy has been practiced, of the cruel tools used to expand human knowledge. Zeke's methods are inhuman, murdering and despoiling the very places and people he claims as the field of his exploration. On the other hand, Erasmus represents another kind of scientist: humble, cautious, empathetic, and more interested in pursuing what is true and good than becoming celebrated. The book never tells us whether his natural history of the Arctic finds success; if it does, it probably still pales in comparison to the fame that the real-life Kent and the fictional Zeke claim. But the Arctic doesn't suffer fools, and perhaps like Franklin, they too will meet the ill consequences of their own recklessness.

An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie

As soon as they saw me, all talking stopped. So intense was the silence, you could have heard a gnat in flight. Then they started to smile again, the women with slightly lowered eyes. When I was standing before them on the wharf, they all raised their heads to look me full in the face. Some children clung to their mothers' coats, and others began to scream with fright or to weep. Others spoke the names of Toornaarsuk and Qvivttoq, spirits who live in the mountains... That's what I was for those children, and not an Inuk like themselves. Like children the world over, they spontaneously spoke their minds about me. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the adults. Proud and secretive, they masked their feelings behind an unchanging smile, mild but enigmatic. Not one of them corrected the children, yet the mothers' calm gave some of the children confidence, and, as they saw me approaching, they too tried to smile--a hesitant, not very assuring smile.

When he was a child, Tete-Michel Kpomassie found a book about the Inuit of Greenland in his village in Togo. He was captivated by the vision of a cold world, one where children are respected and treasured, and no trees to hide in, indeed, no snakes. Having fallen out of a tree after an encounter with a deadly snake, Kpomassie's father promised him to the service of the mysterious python cult, in return for saving his life. As Kpomassie describes it in his memoir of his adventures getting to and traveling in Greenland, the Arctic was a way out of the strict Togolese hierarchies which left him out of control of his own life. Perhaps these rationales exist partly in hindsight--"Do people ever know their true reason for embarking on a long journey?" he asks--but for whatever reason, young Michel is determined: it takes him years, traveling up through West Africa to Europe, taking small jobs, through France and Denmark, until finally he makes the sailing to Greenland with nearly empty pockets.

The indigenous Greenlanders Kpomassie describes are taken aback by his height and appearance--there is some suggestion that he is the first African ever to revisit the remote and lightly populated island--but also welcoming. In every village, Kpomassie is put up by locals, who welcome him into their home, as seems to be the custom. In some cases, they welcome him into their beds, too: Kpomassie is repeatedly floored by the sexual openness of girls and women in Greenland, who seem to treat intimacy in startlingly casual ways. He makes the mistake early on, in southern Greenland, of assuming a relationship he has struck up with a Greenlandic girl is exclusive, and makes a fool of himself by showing jealousy. Even other men's wives offer themselves to him: later, in the even more remote north of Greenland, he watches a strange ceremony where men trade wives ceremonially, and comes to understand this is a method by which inter-family relationships cement themselves. If one man were to die out on the ice, there would be a family for his widow to join ready-made.

Over the course of two years, Kpomassie pushes northward, searching for a more and more remote version of the Greenland he dreamed about in Togo, one with fewer cinemas and blue jeans, more kayaks, anoraks, and seal hunts. As he travels, he sees the darker sides of Greenlandic life: the collapse of traditional life, accelerated by the Danish authorities' termination of small villages and pushing people into the capital at Nuuk (here called Godthab), the poverty and heavy drinking. Autumn, as he describes it, is the worst time to be a Greenlander, when a malaise sets in as the sun begins to vanish--far worse than the winter, when it actually never appears--and the listless state of the sea, which is too icy to be navigated by boat but which hasn't frozen over for dogsled travel. It's in the North that Kpomassie meets the first Greenlander, a powerful and petty village head, who calls him the n-word.

But Kpomassie keeps pushing on, and much of the memoir's charm emerges from his good humor and insatiable desire to make the country his own. He learns Greenlandic; he learns to drive a dogsled; he learns even to love the taste of frozen seal meat. He wants to push onto Thule, the northernmost town on the island, but sea ice keeps him stranded in Upernavik, many miles to the south (though still really, really far up). There he finds a makeshift home with an old man named Robert Mattaaq, who lives with his family in a traditional turf house whose walls are lined with magazine articles, which the well-read Mattaaq calls his "library." It's here, at the end of Kpomassie's journey, that he finds the closest thing to what he has been searching for: a family in a remote place, living according to traditions as old as--but very different from--those of the Togolese, and whose kindness and openness are as fundamental to their survival in this harsh place as their know-how. When at last he returns to Togo, he says that it is to become a "storyteller," who can share the story of people like Robert Mattaaq and the Greenlanders with those in Africa.

Considering this a book from Togo--not Greenland--An African in Greenland represents the 55th country I've read a book from. Cool!

Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

It is as though the land slowly works its way into the man and by virtue of its character eclipses these motives. The land becomes large, alive like an animal; it humbles him in a way he cannot pronounce. It is not that the land is simply beautiful but that it is powerful. Its power derives from the tension between its obvious beauty and its capacity to take life. Its power flows into the mind from a realization of how darkness and light are bound together within it, and the feeling that this is the floor of creation.

One of the coolest places I have ever been is called Burnt Cape on the island of Newfoundland. It is a high hump of grey gravel and white cliffs, dotted with little orange flowers that grow close to the ground to protect themselves from cold temperatures and high winds; they grow nowhere else in the world. Burnt Cape is described as a piece of the Arctic emerging fifteen degrees of latitude below the arctic circle; there are signs that warn travelers that, in rare circumstances, polar bears travel here on spring ice floes. It's a tiny spot, relative to the real Arctic, but it impressed upon me how so stark and enigmatic a landscape can capture the imagination, and become the stuff of dreams.

Barry Lopez's book Arctic Dreams is about the Arctic landscape as it is, and how it is imagined. Lopez, whose extensive experiences with Arctic researchers from Baffin Bay in Alaska to the eastern reaches of Greenland shows through impressively, begins his book with chapters on the region's animal life: the musk ox, the polar bear, the narwhal. Though we have only lately come to pay close attention to these animals through scientific research, Lopez argues, we still know very little about them, and they continue to surprise us. Is it true, as the indigenous people of the Arctic claim, that you should leap from a polar bear's attack to its left, because they are all left-pawed? From there, Lopez moves onto chapters about ice and the landscape, and only at the end of the book, to people: the indigenous people who have lived there for millennia, and the latecomer Europeans who let their dreams run away them and largely shipwrecked into disaster. That's the way it should be, it seems--the people last, and the Europeans last of all.

A relatively educated contemporary reader might cringe at Lopez's use of the word "Eskimo," which is largely thought of these days as a slur (see the CFL team's recent name change to the Edmonton Elk). But that might obscure the tremendous sensitivity Lopez has toward the indigenous people of the Arctic, whose long tenure on the land has produced a knowledge of it that no European can reproduce. He makes a really simple, but somehow not obvious, point about about the difference between Western science and indigenous knowledge: Western science, with its emphasis on controlled experimentation, simply cannot reproduce the number of hours of observation that indigenous communities have devoted to the land in which they live. He gives a remarkably sober and thoughtful treatment of the various benefits and drawbacks of the two kinds of thinking, explaining, for instance, how Western science is better equipped to describe the migrations and entire life cycles of Arctic animals, whom the Inuit or Yupik only encounter during certain seasons. But compare this to the map drawn, by memory, of Cumberland Sound, by an indigenous man, with its many hundreds of tiny inlets.

The first Arctic explorers, Lopez describes, paid insufficient attention to the indigenous people of the Arctic, as they paid insufficient attention to the land itself. The doomed James Franklin of the HMS Terror might have wondered, for instance, why the Inuit are nomadic, or why they travel in small groups, when loading up his ship with hundreds of men and planning to overwinter in the Arctic when trapped in ice. The Arctic has always been a place of men's dreams, Lopez describes, and those who have lived there the best are those who are patient and observant enough to dare the impossible task of taking it on its own terms.

I don't read a lot of non-fiction, so the sample size is small, but I think Arctic Dreams may be the best nature book I've ever read. Lopez certainly has a fiction writer's knack for description, and has a way of making the Arctic landscape, which seems to so many alienating and monotonous, come alive with color and light. He faithfully describes how "the winter face of a muskox, its unperturbed eye glistening in a halo of snow-encrusted hair, looks at you over a cataract of time, an image that has endured all the pulsations of ice," and how "at certain hours the land has the resolution of a polished diamond." I'm reminded of the tremendous descriptions in William Vollmann's The Rifles, but even then I'd have to admit that Lopez's Arctic makes Vollmann's seem drab and bereft.

Arctic Dreams was published in 1986; it sadly has the doomed quality of a letter written by someone who doesn't know it's their last. In the era of climate change, it can seem both incredibly prescient and bleakly quaint. Of all the breathtaking descriptions of stalking polar bears and immense ice fields, it is sobering to think that perhaps the description that has changed the least is that of the dreary corporate wasteland that is Alaska's Prudhoe Bay complex, a place where lonely men come to suck oil out of the sea and try very hard not to look around while they do it. Books like Arctic Dreams are a reminder of what happens to the land, and to us, when we fail to look closely at it.

The Rifles by William T. Vollmann

You came to another lake whose shore was paved with white slabs (and the sky was barred yellow, red, and orange).  But that was not the source of the river, either.  You arrived at the shore of a wide, grey, ankle-deep lake, over which a single bird twittered.  Bands of muted color rippled across that lake.  It flowed steadily in the cool breeze you barely felt.  Black rocks stuck up in it like birds.  The water was pure and good to drink.  Two birds chased you, screaming through the sky.  And you went over another little rise and there was a lake whose waters rippled black and blue and orange and silver, and there was a jet-black ridge behind it topped with blue clouds, and the lake went on and on and on and there was another lake behind it and streams ran out of that lake in all directions and at last you understood that the river you had followed had no one source, that these lakes were permafrost melt; the whole island was permafrost; when you were on the island you were on a world of rivers that came from everywhere.

In the 1840's Sir John Franklin made a final attempt to reach the Northwest Passage aboard the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus.  It was his final attempt because he and his crew got stuck in ice for three years just off of King William Island and died.  It seems to have been a baroque and nightmarish experience: some slowly died of lead poisoning from improperly canned food, others of tuberculosis; some starved on their way trekking across the ice in a last ditch attempt to cross thousands of miles of arctic tundra on foot.

William T. Vollmann's The Rifles tells the story of Franklin's expedition, intertwined with a modern narrative centering around a character called Captain Subzero, a name given to him by some local Inuit children when he first arrives in the Canadian arctic.  Subzero is a stand-in for Vollmann himself, and seems to share a lot of Vollmann's experiences, including accidentally setting his own sleeping bag on fire during an ill-advised attempt to spend a week in the harsh winter in the far north.  Your guess is as good as mine whether, like Subzero, falls in love with an Inuit girl whom he continually returns to visit, impregnates, and abandons to commit suicide.  You'd think the answer is no, but with Vollmann, whose whole schtick is immersing himself in whatever he's writing about, who once joined the mujahideen to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, there's no telling.  I'm going to assert that the "Reepah" parts of the story are mainly fictionalized, because otherwise The Rifles would be very difficult to read.

Subzero believes himself to be the reincarnation of Franklin: a European on a doomed arctic voyage.  But that description doesn't really capture what Vollmann does here, skipping from Franklin to Subzero as if they really are the same person, sometimes in the space of a single sentence.  The whole thing induces whiplash:

Then too there was the matter of his own preferences.  A gentleman puts these aside in favor of others whenever he can, of course, but by GOD he did think that he too had some right to complete the Passage! -- A gentleman is a gentleman: he gave way to Sir John, or rather to his wife. -- As for this matter of Reepah, here I must confess to have been indulging in historical reconstruction.  Such thoughts could only have occurred to Sir James if time works both ways -- that is, if simply because Subzero had become the reincarnation of Franklin, Franklin must then have become (to however slight an extent) identified with Subzero in some manner.  Ask yourself: are you behaving differently at this very moment because someone not yet to be born for a century or more will someday think about you?  You cannot prove the contrary.  -- What's the difference anyway whether it's so?  Ice-floes, no matter how white, and water, no matter how blue or grey, eventually reach the same color in the distance.

Vollmann's become a hot commodity lately thanks to the popularity of Europe Central and The Dying Grass, a 1000-page novel about the Nez Perce that's part of the same series as The Rifles investigating European interactions with Native Americans.  But most of what I could find people saying about The Rifles was largely negative.  I understand why people might feel that way: Vollmann's immersive tactics can seem precious, rather than innovative, and the metafictional stuff might seem tedious.  To those voices I add: I wish that we would stop using victimized women as symbols of colonized lands, which is something that The Rifles' Reepah has in common with the Pocahontas of Argall.

But I think there's a remarkable honesty in Vollmann's project.  Subzero mistreats Reepah fabulously, refusing to leave his wife for her or vice versa.  He loves to entertain the radical idea of moving to the Canadian arctic and settling down with an Inuit woman, but when provided the opportunity, he finds that he can't take the other foot out of the old U.S. of A.  In this way, Vollmann aligns himself not with the beleaguered Inuit, but the Europeans who introduced the rifles to them, which ended up devastating their hunting practices.  It's no coincidence that Reepah kills herself with a shotgun.

One reviewer complains that Vollmann has nothing insightful to say about the Inuit, but I think that's the point; it's impossible, Vollmann argues, for the descendants of white Europeans to really understand the First Nations whose historical oppression they have inherited.  By aligning himself with Subzero, Vollmann doesn't shy away from that inheritance or minimize it.  That's one of the reasons that this book, which takes so many weird liberties in other ways, is so scrupulously researched and footnoted: all the knowledge and research that Vollmann/Subzero possesses cannot stop him from reenacting the calamities of colonialism over and over.

Other things I really admired about this book are: the sharp, observant descriptions of the Arctic landscape, which do a great job distinguishing one island from another.  Not all Arctic islands, it seems, are created equally, which is something the Inuit found out who were forcibly removed to the far northern outposts of Grise Fiord and Resolute by the Canadian government.  I loved the description at the top of this review, which emphasized their status as terra incognita, which obviate any attempt at wayfinding, and which echoes just how lost the Franklin expedition becomes.

And though her fate in the book is tragic, I thought the depiction of Reepah was charming and lovingly drawn.  I have no way of telling if her unstudied English is an accurate depiction of how an Inuit woman might talk, but it felt real.  "Someone stole my secrets," she says, poetically, and only several paragraphs later we find that she means that someone stole her cigarettes.  She has a real life on the page that contrasts to the dead-eyed foolishness and selfishness of Subzero, or the obsessive fatalism of Franklin.

Ultimately I really liked the unpredictable seesawing of time in The Rifles, which added an element of novelty to the hyperhistorical slog that is Argall, a book I also really liked.  There are three more of these books, most of them big bricks nearing or passing a thousand pages, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to read those, now, too.