Shiver me timbers

Brrrrr, this is a chilly book. Each time a character put on his sealskin kamiks, muskrat hat, wolfskin mittens and otter pelt coat I buttoned another cardigan toggle and shivered. It’s a book that gets you down to the marrow.

The compass of Ed O’Loughlin’s Minds of Winter points north by northnorth. Up and up it goes, drawn by husky dogs towards the North Pole, chillier and chillier by degrees, frostbitten, snow-blind but determined. It follows three centuries of explorers of the North West Territories, each generation on its own frozen adventure: to find the NorthWest passage, to recover an ice-bound ship, to reach the Pole, to stake a flag, to fly reconnaissance, to restore an antique chronometer, stolen and stolen again, to Greenwich, to find a brother who has disappeared into endless Arctic night.

Wolves block paths, ice flowers bloom inside the walls of cabin-fevered shacks, snow preserves bodies that never turn to skeletons, ice floes drift into open water and ink pots must be thawed inside clothes before the ship’s log can be written. In one chapter we make it as far south as the Orkneys and it feels positively balmy. When a pilot gives his name to a new island he reads a christening prayer: ‘God bless her and all who freeze on her.’ Freezing to death is a mercy. That at least is quick. Scurvy, frostbite and paraffin-lamp madness are slow killers.

Ships are pincered by ice that will not thaw even in summer. The sailors know when they are ice-trapped. There is a sound like ‘giant claws scraping both sides of the ship’. The polar light is beautiful, but when you haven’t seen new grass, a fresh orange or a woman since Greenland, it starts to play tricks.