Claws sliced the air not five inches from his back. Even in his terror, Blanky marveled – he knew that the arc of his kick had put almost ten feet of air between him and the mainmast as he swung past. The thing must have sunk the claws of its right paw – or hand, or talon, or Devil's nails – into the mast itself while hanging almost free and swinging six feet or more of massive arm at him. But it had missed. It would not miss again when Blanky swung back to the centre.
Before I left on holidays, someone asked me what I would be reading and I was excited to reply that I was finally getting around to The Terror by Dan Simmons – a book, as I understood it, that was about the doomed Franklin Expedition of 1845, filled with all of the historical bits about the British Navy's quest for the Northwest Passage, rumoured cannibalism, and spoiled tinned goods. As someone who has read quite a few nonfiction books about the Franklin Expedition, a straight fictional treatment of the story on its own might not have drawn me in, but what's special about this book, as I explained, is that there's some kind of preternatural monster that begins preying on the expedition's crew when they find their ships icebound and helpless. And to add another layer of interest for me, this creature is apparently based on Inuit legend; according to the people who actually live there, this creature might actually exist. The Terror does include all of these layers, but as much as I was looking forward to reading it, as strong as the narrative began, in the end, it became too long, too repetitive, the creature didn't make nearly enough appearances, and when the tie-in to Inuit mythology came crashing in at the end, it felt abrupt and culturally insensitive. Just barely more like than dislike for this one.
The first chapter, set in 1847 as Captain Crozier of the icebound HMS Terror inspects his ship's lower holds, ends on the perfect note:
Something, Francis Crozier suspects, has dug down through these tons of snow and tunneled through the iron-hard slabs of ice to get at the hull of the ship. Somehow the thing has sensed which parts of the interior along the hull, such as the water-storage tanks, are lined with iron, and found one of the few hollow outside storage areas – the Dead Room – that leads directly into the ship. And now it's banging and clawing to get in. Crozier knows that there's only one thing on earth with that much power, deadly persistence, and malevolent intelligence. The monster on the ice is trying to get at them from below.The second chapter then rewinds to 1845, following Captain and expedition leader Sir John Franklin as he prepares for the voyage in the final days before sailing. Again, Simmons hit all the right notes – ominous warnings from other polar explorers about the unsuitability of the two ships under Franklin's command, an introduction to Franklin's history of incompetence and pride, the drawing out of suspense until we can learn more about the monster from the first chapter – and for the longest time, I was satisfied by the shifting timelines and multiple POVs. But this is a long book, and being satisfied for the longest time doesn't mean that I was satisfied for most of this (for example: around page four hundred, Crozier spends pages making a mental list of everyone the expedition had lost to that point and how they died and I truly resented the recap; if I didn't remember any specifics to that point it's because I didn't find them important; Simmons was making a long book needlessly longer and he lost my trust. A couple of hundred pages later, Crozier went through this mental muster again. Ugh. Also: I don't ever need to hear the terms “Preston Patent Illuminators” or “Frazer's Patent Stove” again [I doubt that the crew used these ungainly names, so why should Simmons? Repeatedly?], be told once more that a man with scurvy can be startled to death by a gun shot, nor be reminded that while muskets are more accurate, the seamen were more comfortable with shotguns. One time for each would have done it. Too long made too much longer. Double Ugh.)
Blanky knew a secret that made even his sanguine personality wane: the Thing on the Ice, the Terror itself, was after him.There were many scenes that I did like: Franklin's death took my breath away, I was thoroughly mesmerised by the Carnavale, Hickey's dance took me completely by surprise. Spending months in the dead of winter trapped aboard ship in the ice, and then spending weeks and months hauling sledges across unyielding fields of snow boulders, all while suffering scurvy, malnutrition, and mortal terror, was described in grueling and pitiable detail. I know that the grind and boredom and relentless labour was kind of the point here, but I just wish that more happened in this book; there's a monster following you on the ice, how was that not more exciting? Of course, we all understand that the most monstrous thing out there is man himself:
“All this natural misery,” Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. “Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?”And then there's the Inuit presence that ultimately rubbed me the wrong way. “Lady Silence” – a young Inuit woman whose tongue had been chewed off by someone or something– is present from the first chapter, and even if it's historically accurate for the seamen of the day to have referred to her as the “Esquimeaux bitch” or “heathen witch”, her mysterious and mute presence makes her out to be, if not less than, then certainly other than human. In a scene reminiscent of the one I liked about the monster trying to claw its way into the Terror's hull, there's a later one in which a young lieutenant discovers Lady Silence's secret sleeping quarters, from which she had apparently forced her way out of the hull:
Could Lady Silence have done this to the ship? The thought terrified Irving more than any belief in magical ability to appear and disappear at will. Could a young woman not yet twenty years old rip iron hull plates off a ship, dislodge bow timbers that it had taken a shipyard to bend and nail into place, and know exactly where to do all this so sixty men aboard who knew the ship better than their mothers' faces would not notice?It was with the symmetry of this scene that I really began to dislike Simmons' use of the Lady Silence character, and as other Inuit are introduced, my feelings didn't improve. And then when Simmons recounts the Inuit creation myth and other sacred stories – including the history of where the Terror from the Ice may have come from – that felt like cultural misappropriation; these weren't his stories to tell, and he just wedged them in at the end – and then decided to make a white man join the Inuit and become a leader on their spiritual journey. Lady Silence – if she needed to be a character in Simmons' story – could have been a strong and competent teacher trying to help the expedition to survive, but instead, she's an exotic beauty with literally no voice, certified virgin by the ship's doctor, who peers into men's souls and sleeps in the nude. No thanks.
Because I know the Inuit material really tainted my experience with The Terror, I'm going to end with a couple of officially published reviews. A positive one from Kirkus Review from 2010:
Simmons convincingly renders both period details and the nuts and bolts of polar exploration as his narrative moves back and forth in time to show the expedition’s launch in 1845 and its early days in the Arctic. Tension builds as the men struggle to survive: The thing is a constant menace, and deaths continue to mount as a result of brutal Arctic conditions. The supernatural element helps resolve the plot in a surprising yet highly effective manner. One of Simmons’ best.
And this contrary opinion from Terrence Rafferty in The New York Times from 2007:
That persistence alone isn’t enough to transform a bad idea into a good one is probably the chief lesson of the Franklin expedition in particular and the quest for the Northwest Passage in general. The passage, in fact, resisted discovery until 1906; the construction of the Panama Canal soon rendered it unnecessary. The attempt to produce a massive historical novel — one that might achieve the commercial glory of, for example, “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” or “The Crimson Petal and the White” — isn’t, of course, a folly on that level. The quest for the Big Book is neither as heroic an endeavor nor, fortunately, as lethal. (“The Terror” won’t kill you unless it falls on your head.) But when a writer as canny as Dan Simmons can talk himself into something as foolhardy as “The Terror,” you know there’s a kind of insanity loose in the world of publishing, and all I really want to say in my one little page is, Stop the madness.I tend to the latter opinion.
