The qamutik, my compass, would be my sundial. I rigged a slot into the center of the sled and planted the harpoon. Its shadow crossed the deck on the starboard side of stern. It flickered as a low cloud slid by, then set. The mark stayed true. I had harnessed the sun.
Compass combines a lot of my favourite themes — Far North nature writing, Indigenous mythology, a person being pushed to the limits of survival and sanity — and as a medical doctor who has served as a fly-in physician for a traditional Inuit community on the Arctic Circle for the past fifteen years, author Murray Lee is well-placed to tell this outsider tale of an arrogant adventurer who mistakenly believes that the North has been tamed since the dangerous heydays of polar exploration. From early on we know that some tragedy will befall this character (dubbed “Guy” by his Inuit hosts and otherwise unnamed) — so, while a thriller, the plot is less about what ultimately happens than what leads up to it — and by making Guy essentially unlikeable and unself-aware, Lee sets up a situation that gives the reader a delicious feeling of schadenfreude. I liked everything about this — Compass certainly doesn’t feel like a debut novel — and I hope that for a small release it gets a big reception. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Nowadays, with modern navigation systems and conveniently thin ice, cruise ships like mine glide through the waters on little more than a collective whim and the pensions of upper-middle-class urban professionals. Every fog-shrouded little beach they pass is the deserted stage of historic tragedy. My job on these trips was to tell those stories of shipwrecks and starvation — ghost stories, I suppose — as satellites guided our ship safely through a sea of despair. We were walking, as it were, on a path made of bones.
A former academic who became famous writing pop history books, Guy has been travelling the world on the lecture circuit, rehashing the tales of European exploration with a specialty in the Far North. Notwithstanding his Gore-Tex parka and carefully curated adventurer’s beard, Guy was outed as a poser by a colleague who had actually been to “The Edge” (the place where the northern lands, or at least the solid ice, meets the open sea), and when he has a break in his touring schedule, Guy determines to make a trek to The Edge to see it in person. Despite the local Inuit contending that June is the wrong time of year to make such a trip, Guy insists on bending reality to his own convenience and off he heads into the midnight sun with little more than his reluctant guide and a flask of celebratory Scotch. What could go wrong?
I enjoyed the nature writing, the historic storytelling, the Inuit mythology, and maybe especially, the reality of Canada’s nebulous claim to the North:
Every Nunavut town I’ve ever been in has had a small patrol and Sim was exactly the type of guy who was in each of them. A volunteer militia in matching red sweatshirts tobogganing around the Arctic as Russian and American nuclear submarines slip silently underneath them. It is such a Canadian approach to national defense — understated, admirable, and quite possibly completely ineffective.
And:
The fact that Canada has kept itself together is a sign of either the kindness of its neighbors or a worldwide lack of interest in what that place has to offer. Certainly, they don’t put up much of a defense. The world’s longest coastline and, as far as I can tell, the country seems to rely on the honor system.
Parenthetically: I once met an American — an educated, well-travelled professional from Chicago — who laughed when I suggested that Santa Claus is a Canadian. He laughed but then said, “Wait. Do you actually believe the North Pole is in Canada?” I replied yes; if you look at a map, Canada goes all the way up to the top. And he said, “Now that’s funny.” Well, where do people think Canada stops? I appreciate that Lee points out our precarious claim (or at least our inability to defend it). And I want to make mention of some intriguing quirks of Lee’s vocabulary that point to his medical background. Twice he refers to “omentum” (once as a "choice" bit of meat that was offered to Guy [which he eventually spat into a stream], and once as Guy held some after gutting an animal), and he uses more evocatively bowellish terms to describe the polar ice: Guy notes that the ice rumbled with “borborygmic bass-beats that I could feel beneath my feet,” and he grew to fear “the deep, wet respirations of an edematous death. It was the end of my ice.” I had to look those words up, and I appreciate their imaginative use.
The ice was etched like elephant skin. Pools had formed at a few fissures’ forks, bleeding into each other through a latticework of shallow channels. I knew the floe was thick from looking down the breathing hole, but it was clearly rotting. And beyond the ice, along the shore on its every side, little waves were eating at the edge, as industrious as ants. My world was a clock, counting down.
What most worked for me in Compass was the slow revelation of Guy’s character: as a first-person narrative, it isn’t obvious from the beginning how generally unliked and undeserving of his acclaim Guy really is, but it eventually becomes clear that his hubris will demand a response from the gods; even if they aren’t his gods. A fast and engaging read, this really worked for me.
