rec'd by People mag

http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2009-0... ( )

A chilly tale of historical horror... Simmons takes the question of the fate of the lost Franklin Expedition (seeking the northwest passage), and imagines that it was not merely the unforgiving arctic ice that did in the two ships and their crews, but a paranormal creature out of Eskimo lore. ( )

After the sun-lit world of Olympos, Simmons plunges his readers into his darkest material since perhaps Carrion Comfort. That in itself is not necessarily a problem, but there is an issue with the way the novel is being billed.

It is NOT a historical novel with a metaphorical element of horror. It is a HORROR novel that happens to have a historical setting.

Again, not in itself a problem. But Simmons himself seems to have difficulty deciding which kind of a novel he's writing, so the historical elements place constraints on the story that keep it from having a fully satisfying plot, while the horror elements introduce events that are historically ridiculous.

After Olympos, Terror's Hobbesian theme is stunningly bleak. But then, life WOULD be nasty, brutish, short, etc. if one were on an early 19th-century Arctic expedition whose captain made astonishingly bad decisions based on an irrational faith that God would see them through--or if one were an Inuit of that time. So the final Rousseau-like chapters romanticizing the "noble Inuit" are particularly strange. Simmons is inordinately impressed with the only two things the Inuit could do: build igloos, which really isn't that hard (I did it as a boy scout at age thirteen or so, though mine no doubt lacked the mathematical symmetry of those Simmons describes, though it's not as if the Inuit, lacking a system of writing, could actually have grasped the higher mathematics of what they were supposedly doing); and hunting seal, which, well, they'd pretty much HAVE to be good at. (None of this is meant to belittle or morally criticize the Inuit of the time, as given their circumstances, it would have been near impossible for them to advance much beyond that.)

Also, Simmons has already done the "what if their primitive mythology were true?" bit in Fires of Eden, with the much more entertaining Hawaiian mythology, and unhampered by pretensions to historicity.

Still, Simmons' style here is beautiful, and many of the characters are among the best he's created, so it's certainly worth a read, like everything else he's written. ( )

Full review: http://realmofryan.blogspot.com/2009/... ( )