Contemporary travel books often read like modern reworkings of the heroic quest, riddled with self-conscious allusions to the epic. The author is cast, with varying degrees of irony, as a sort of Theseus or Jason, slaying personal minotaurs or hunting golden fleeces. The object of the trail, the grail treasure, is knowledge: of oneself, or of one’s ancestors — an admirable great-uncle who preceded one on the voyage, for example — or of some particular story, a skein unravelled.

River of White Nights starts out as one such contemporary epic, as suggested in the determined hint of its title. Jeffrey Tayler, an American living in Moscow with his Russian wife, decides to travel 2,400 miles by boat along the Lena river. He is, he explains, in search of a ‘revivifying wilderness, peace and escape from the trials that humans afflict on one another’. And he wants to pit his wits against the merciless current, camp out in one of the last great ‘nowheres’, and arrive at the Arctic waters of the Laptev Sea.

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