The heart of whiteness

Happiness writes white, it’s said: so too, one would think, does Antarctica. How is it possible to describe an environment which tolerates almost no life, which is derived from a single substance, and which is for the most part a single colour? Early explorers were simultaneously horrified and enthralled by the continent’s awesome singularity. Scott wrote of its ‘silent, wind-swept immensity’; Shackleton’s surgeon, Alexander Macklin, of its ‘same unbroken whiteness’.

Given Antarctica’s unsurpassed simplicity as a landform, one might expect writers to have shied away from it. And yet this fearsomely meaningless place has, especially in the 20th century, generated an enormous literature. For nearly 200 years, explorers, scientists and first-rank writers as various as Henry Thoreau and Thomas Pynchon have been attempting to come to terms with Antarctica through language.

Stephen Pyne’s magnificent book, The Ice, must be numbered among the finest of these attempts. First published quietly by a US academic press in 1986, it has now, thankfully, been reissued by Weidenfeld, and comes bearing the imprimatur of Simon Schama, who calls it ‘one of the very greatest things ever written on the cultural history of the earth’.

It is a hard book to classify, but perhaps the best label would be a science-opera. Pyne divides the continent up into five ‘terranes’: the five concentric regions – the Pack, the Shelf, the Glacier, the Sheet, the Source – which together make up the Ice. Consecrating a chapter to each terrane, his book moves poetically and inexorably inwards, towards the Pole itself, the very heart of whiteness – ‘the unblinking emptiness that commands its center.’ In between his chapters on the terranes, Pyne writes with breathtaking versatility and range of knowledge about the other aspects of Antarctica: its science, its exploration, the art and literature it has inspired, and its geopolitics.