Although billed as a travel book this is in reality a cultural and scientific history of the Arctic, strong on explorers and environmental crises. No sooner does Wheeler arrive somewhere and settle in than a torrent of unstopppable research starts pouring forth onto the pages. In her Antarctic book the science came in bite-sizes, straight from the scientists’ mouths. Here it is the fruit of months cooped up in libraries. There is little reported speech and we meet relatively few people. In the Antarctic she was always the last to leave the party, always game for a lark: now, she arrives on station, unpacks and starts reading a good book.
The exception is the section on the Lapps, appparently written in 2002, for a journalistic assignment. The people, landscape and nomadic herding way of life touch her romantic sensibility, and her prose soars. At her best Wheeler is as good a travel writer as Colin Thubron or William Dalrymple: in her new book she touches this form consistently in Lapland.
Unfortunately, it is a small section of an overlong, over-ambitious and over-researched book. The interminable chunks of science have the frowning concentration of a sequence of concerned supplements for the Guardian. The pages on explorers and pioneers are well written, but it has all been done many times before, and the feeling grows that Wheeler is padding out a commission.
Thirteen years ago political correctness was less entrenched than today, and there is evidence of editorial prudery at work censoring Wheeler’s now dated vulgarity. ‘Look, a place called Gobbler’s Knob!’ she shouts to her companion in Alaska — and in the text they drive on. The photo tells a different story: there is Sara, fetching in a fur hat, looking naughty and grinning at the camera, posing under the Gobbler’s Knob road sign. Obviously, they stopped, messed around, made some jokes, and took a photo opportunity. How much more of the old-style 1996 Sara was snipped out one wonders? A wise editor could have advised her to concentrate on the Lapps. Then we might have had a real masterpiece.
Robert Carver’s Paradise with Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay (HarperPerennial £8.99) was shortlisted for the Royal Literary Society Ondaatje prize.
