The Snow Man
by Wallace StevensI will have to conclude that I, myself, have a “mind of winter”: I feel no misery at the sound of a January wind; can mentally relate to the romanticism of early Polar expeditions. I was consistently charmed and fascinated by Ed O'Loughlin's Minds of Winter – a sweeping epic of exploration, historical mystery, and the hardy people who dare brave the frozen poles – yet I am willing to concede that it might not have universal appeal; this ticked my boxes but might leave another reader...cold. I am delighted to see this title has made the shortlist for the 2017 Giller Prize – I wouldn't be unhappy if it won.
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
If you look at the maps of the Arctic, the Antarctic too, you'll see the same people's names repeated over and over again. And most of those people were connected to each other. Maybe stories converge at the poles. Like the lines on the map.The framing device for this book sees a “chance encounter at the top of the world”: A drifter, Arthur “Nelson” Nilsson, has been summoned to Inuvik in the Northwest Territories by his older brother Bert – a high-security-level government Geographer who had decided to semi-retire as a high school teacher in the north – but after waiting in Bert's apartment for over a week and discovering a suicide note of sorts, Nelson decides to leave town. On his way out, Nelson stops at the airport (thinking he could buy cigarettes there) and he runs into Fay Morgan – a British woman who has come to Inuvik on the trail of her maternal grandfather who disappeared there in the Fifties – and when she mistakes Nelson for a taxi driver, he decides he could use the money if she wants to hire him for a few days. When Nelson eventually brings Fay back to Bert's apartment, and she discovers her grandfather's name among the missing brother's papers, the two decide to work together to solve the mysteries that appear to link the former strangers.
Central to the contrived mystery is a real life enigma: A chronometer (known as the Arnold 294) that was lost with the doomed Franklin Expedition resurfaced 164 years later at a London auction, having been reconfigured at some point as a carriage clock. It would seem that Bert had been trying to trace the history of the time piece, and with his security clearance, had assembled a thick file folder of classified and obscure documents. Minds of Winter, therefore, sees Nelson and Fay playing detective in the high Arctic of today, and in between short scenes of them driving the ice highway to Tuktoyaktuk or visiting the grave of the Mad Trapper of Rat River in Aklavik, various documents are included in full that tell (predominantly) adventurous tales set in Van Diemen's Land in 1841, Lancaster Sound in 1848, King William Island in 1903, Antarctica in 1911, The Korea-Manchuria Border in 1904, Edmonton in 1932, Northern Ireland in 1942. Historic polar explorers are inserted – Amudsen, Oates, Scott, Franklin – and like a bad penny, several characters keep turning up over the years; hinting at the covert operations of the shadowy Room 38; somehow linked to Franklin's chronometer. Jack London tells an unpublished tale of cabin-fever and gold-madness; spiritualists are called in to locate Franklin's missing boats; a mythic “bone tribe” haunts the high Arctic that even their cousins, the Inuit, fear to meet. We go from the Boer War to the World Wars to the Cold War; trace communication technology from cairns and message tubes to telegraphy to radar and satellites; watch as the explorers' hard won maps fit precisely over those drawn from Inuit lore. This story is truly epic – global in reach and subject matter – but it feels, ultimately, like a completely Canadian story. You can't contrive a book of the poles without strong nature writing, and O'Loughlin doesn't disappoint:
It was the sky above that shocked him. The sea ice, the western mountains, the island where he stood, were shades of black and grey and pastel, like a half-remembered dream. But the abyss above him blazed with life and business. Far above, a band of nacreous cloud caught the last of the year's civil twilight, a gauzy patch of iridescent pinks and mauves. The stars burned so fiercely that it seemed to Oates if he held his breath he would hear them. They shone so hard he wanted to duck.I've seen other reviewers complain that the chronometer is a weak link between all these disparate tales (I can't deny it), and that the framing device with Fay and Nelson feels underdeveloped (and there's truth to that as well). But with mirages and folklore and men disappearing into the snow – even the similarity between the name Fay Morgan and the fata morgana; the Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is – the following seems to be the crux around which everything else turns; that which elevates this book in my own mind to a worthy work of literature:
A globe was round and you couldn't fall off it. But a map was a map, a metaphor, full of judgements and choices and victories and regrets; a map was built on backs and heuristics and mistakes and lies, cracks through which you might, just maybe, somehow slip away.So, perhaps it is just due to my own mind of winter, but this book worked for me on every level. Loved it.
The 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:
David Chariandy: Brother
Rachel Cusk: Transit
David Demchuk: The Bone Mother
Joel Thomas Hynes: We'll All Be Burned in Our Beds Some Night
Andrée A. Michaud: Boundary
Josip Novakovich: Tumbleweed
Ed O'Loughlin: Minds of Winter
Zoey Leigh Peterson: Next Year, for Sure
Michael Redhill: Bellevue Square
Eden Robinson: Son of a Trickster
Deborah Willis: The Dark and other Love Stories
Michelle Winters: I Am a Truck
After finishing reading the longlist, I'll rank the shortlist (according to my own enjoyment only):
I Am a Truck
Minds of Winter
Son of a Trickster
Bellevue Square
Transit
