The Ice Museum: In
Search of the Lost Land of Thule,
by Joanna Kavenna
Reviewed by Peter
FjŒgesund
The Ice Museum (recently published by Penguin) has been hailed
as an almost sensational debut, and when Viking launched the first edition in
2005, they brought out some big guns to grace the cover. Colin Thurbon called
it "a truly original dŽbut" and a "sensitive exploration";
Giles Foden was "captivated"; having produced a stream of
superlatives, Avi Shlaim concluded by praising Kavenna for her "profound
knowledge of Nordic history, literature and mythology. The result is a magical
book about a magical land." Finally, Robert Macfarlane called it "a
brilliant debut, an important and unusual book".
I have to admit I am
not particularly enthusiastic about the practice among publishers of taking
away from reviewers the chance of freely assessing a new and as yet unreviewed
book by including on the cover what can only be called quasi-reviews, i.e.
brief comments commisioned by the publisher in order to sell the book. In this
case there is also something slightly worrying about the choice of names,
because what are, for instance, Thubron's, Foden's and Shlaim's qualifications
when it comes to Arctic and Nordic history? There are many aspects of The
Ice Museum that I really liked,
and it is undoubtedly a good read, but I also have some very important
reservations about the book.
First of all, as an
academic I am both fascinated by and highly sceptical of the form. The genre of
travel writing has always been double-edged. Since the Romantic period it has
been a highly personal and subjective account. At the same time, many travel
accounts are also impressively informative and reveal an admirable amount of
reading and learning in a form that is accessible to the general reader. This
successful combination of the subjective and the objective is very much present
in books such as Barry Lopez' Arctic Dreams and Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind, and in a book that was published at the same
time as Kavenna's: Robert McGhee's The Last Imaginary Place (recently reviewed here). Kavenna clearly uses
these and others as recipe books for her own account. As it says on the jacket,
she blends "travelogue, reportage, memoir and literary essay".
From an academic point
of view, the main problem is that the writer (and/or the publisher) offers no
bibliography, footnotes or other references to sources. All it contains in the
acknowledgements at the back are the names of a few persons and institutions
that have offered her help and inspiration along the way. This means that
Kavenna herself carries the whole burden of presenting a trustworthy account,
while all the factual, or supposedly factual, information floats in mid air. As a result, a
reader who finds some factual mistakes, immediately also begins to distrust
other information. Kavenna, in other words, leaves herself open to the possibly
unjust suspicion that much of the information presented is taken from
unreliable sources or is simply invented. Sadly, a closer reading confirms that
this suspicion is not unfounded. Let me give some examples:
Kavenna claims,
apparently as a fact, that Fridtjof Nansen "had even been offered the
title of King after independence" (p.166; all page references are to the
first edition). This rumour, however, is very loosely founded and should
definitely not be referred to as a fact. Similarly, it is claimed that the
Nazis offered Nansen "the title †bermensch, but Nansen refused it" (167). Again, as Nansen died
in 1930, it would be interesting to see the source of this information. Also,
there are no indications that Nansen visited Svalbard on his return from the
Fram expedition in 1896 (309). Later on, the author describes a stay in a cabin
near Bergen in the middle of the summer, and complains that "some nights
we couldn't sleep at all, because the sun shone through the night hours"
(174). Again, this gives the impression of something close to the midnight sun,
which is definitely not found as far south as Bergen! Furthermore, at the age
of eighteen, the author went on a trip from Bergen and northwards, and drove
through "fishing villages and oil towns" (175). I am not aware that
there are any oil towns north of Bergen. Neither is it true that the Germans
destroyed Bod¿ at the end of the war, while retreating from the Russians
(183-84). On the contrary, the German bombing took place at the very beginning
of the war, in 1940, and the Russians were never at any time anywhere near as
far south as Bod¿. Finally, Svalbard was not "bombed and occupied by the
Germans" during the war (311). Against this background, it becomes almost
embarrassingly apt that the author claims on p. 196 that the writer Knut Hamsun
after the war was "judged to have 'permanently impaired mental
facilities'", clearly meaning "faculties".
These factual mistakes
leave serious doubts not just about the quality of the author's own research
for the book and about the editorial work of the publisher, but also about the
qualifications of the enthusiastic supporters on the book's cover. Again, with
what authority does Avi Shlaim claim that Kavenna has a "profound
knowledge of Nordic history" when he himself has not spotted such rather
obvious slips?
What is more serious
than a frustrating number of factual mistakes, however, is the pervasively
stereotyped attitude at the back of the entire narrative. From the point of
view of non-British readers, this becomes a constant source of irritation. In
the otherwise interesting chapter about the Thule Society in Germany, for
instance, Kavenna describes the scene in a bar in Munich: "The Bavarians
were sitting around tables, while the hostess slammed glasses of beer into
their hands. Silence was verboten; everyone screamed and cheered, laughter came in basso
waves across the room. The tables were engulfed in noise, a sense of community
so pronounced it seemed like collective madness" (139). In light of the
sinister story about the Nazi fascination with the land of Thule, which the
author is in Munich to research, this passage confirms with a highly unpleasant
use of irony some very primitive stereotypes about Germans in general. In the
description of her journey through Norway, other stereotypes –
uncritically inherited from nineteenth-century travel accounts – are
equally conspicuous. While the author is staying near Trondheim in the winter,
for instance, "it was impossible to walk for more than an hour in the cold
air; it made my lungs ache É" (181). Similarly in Karasjok in Finnmark
everyone in a supermarket "was buying hats and gloves, because the wind
was growing harsher and more persistent by the hour" (213), as if people
in this part of the world would run to the supermarket every time the cold set
in! In other words, these incidents are either completely invented or
drastically exaggerated.
Another stereotype is
that of Norwegian simplicity, primitivism and remoteness. Whereas Kavenna
describes Bod¿ as "a small Arctic outpost" (183), a new webpage
describes it like this: "With its 43,000 residents it is the second
largest town in Northern Norway, with excellent communications and fully modern
facilities. É Each year, more than 1.5 million people travel to and from Bod¿
by air, railway, bus, express boat or coastal steamer".
A similarly stereotyped
attitude, recognizable from numerous reality shows on TV, is found in the
description of Kavenna's trip to the Thule air base in northern Greenland. In
order to bring some needed drama into the voyage in a supposedly half-wrecked
icebreaker, a conflict is introduced between the Captain (himself a stereotype
of the rough Arctic captain) and a Phillipine sailor as to whether it is
advisable to go that far north. The intention is clear: the author wants to
introduce the old fear, present in numerous accounts from the Arctic, of being
beset in the ice. The Captain, therefore, suddenly has qualms and adds, out of
the blue, that permission to make a stop at the Thule base has been denied. In
addition, we are asked to believe that Kavenna herself overhears this
conversation while taking a nap on the deck (a few pages earlier the cold in
Trondheim was too much for her lungs!). All in all, the incident is a classic
fictional one (there is a parallel scene in Conrad's Heart of Darkness), and hardly credible as a realistic account.
The next incident is hardly more credible. Having arrived in the bitterly cold
Thule, she observes the drunken locals. One of them is an Inuit man standing on
the shore, playing a guitar and singing "to the twilight". It is
tempting to quote the entire paragraph:
"He was singing
about the mountian by old Thule, where the Inuit had buried their dead. It was
a lament, soft in the stillness. As he played the locals began to sing along, a
strange chorus, lifting their voices to the ice plain. A steady droning of male
and female voices, with a few more Inuit coming to join the choir, huddled in
their coats. It had a curious effect on my frozen senses – the soprano
female voices, the men singing the bass lines, everyone shivering slightly on
the beach, the lights of the town glinting up the rubble coast. It was crazy
and moving, this faint sound of voices, in this village in the wilderness"
(290).
I am sorry, but to this
reader, this account carries no conviction. On the contrary, it is contrived,
artificial, made up, and only serves to reinforce old prejudices and
preconceptions about simple and primitive peoples. Unfortunately, these
weaknesses – and there are more than those mentioned here – tend to
overshadow the book's qualities. It is to be hoped that author and publisher
alike will take the opportunity, in connection with future editions, to make
the changes that are needed. But it will require a major rewriting. As it
stands, this book definitely does not deserve the praise that has been heaped
upon it. One might dislike the rigour and complexities of real scholarship, but
in this case a solid dose of it is required to balance the picture and create
the kind of book that the topic deserves.