‘It’s not what’s here — it’s what’s not here’ is the reason given by a voluntary exile in the Alaskan wilderness to the author’s question.
‘It’s not what’s here — it’s what’s not here’ is the reason given by a voluntary exile in the Alaskan wilderness to the author’s question. ‘What keeps you here?’ Space, lack of people, freedom, and personal indepen- dence compensate some for the cold, isolation and loneliness.
Starting in Chukotka, in easternmost Siberia, Sara Wheeler moves via Alaska to the Canadian far north, Greenland, the islands of Svalbad north of Norway, Lapland and eventually Solovki Island in the White Sea, home to an Orthodox monastery converted into a Bolshevik concentration camp by Lenin. These are journeys round the Arctic Circle, then, made in jumps, and separated by many years. In 1996 Wheeler published Terra Incognita on her travels to the scientific stations of the Antarctic: that book was received with justified plaudits. Those expecting a sequel might have predicted a polar balancing act up north — but this is a very different project. Part of the charm of her Antarctic adventures was the teasing, flirtatious relationships she developed with the ‘beards’, as she called them, the young, gauche US and British scientists overwintering in temperatures down to minus 55 C. Then single, in her mid-thirties, with no children, Wheeler managed to make these unpromising characters come alive and even imbued their juvenile antics with a sort of clottish heroism.
Now, 13 years later, Wheeler has two children, Reg and Wilf, both of whom accompany her on parts of these journeys. The flirty, jokey singleton, up for a laugh and full of vulgar jokes, as well as a genuine interest in hard science, has vanished, replaced by a serious middle-aged mum flying hither and yon commissioned to write travel pieces for the London papers. Travelling with your family, Philip Glazebrook observed, is like waltzing with your aunt. The casual encounters, sudden meetings and partings, swift, deep friendships that single travellers experience are denied couples . . . and mums with attendant kids.
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.
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