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Loading... The Voyage of the Narwhalby Andrea Barrett
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This book has it all: man vs. man, man vs. nature and love story all rolled into one real page-turner; a great story of Arctic adventures, both real and fictional. Erasmus Wells accompanies his sister's fiance on an Arctic voyage in the late 1800's to discover what happened to previous explorer, John Franklin. His brother-in-law to be and ship's commander, Zeke, however, has bigger plans. He forces the crew to winter-over in the Arctic (unplanned) to further search for an open polar sea. The crew rebels, after Zeke fails to get started home when the weather and seas break after 18 months. He goes on his own on foot and when he doesn't return by the time he said he would, the crew abandons the ship and heads for home on foot and with sledges. This part of the story was RIVETING. Barrett made me feel as if I was in the Arctic myself. At home, Lavinia (Zeke's fiance) and Alexandra, who is a companion for Olivia, wait. The crew makes it back without Zeke, who is presumed dead, and the resolution of the story starts at this point. Excellent! (  ) brenzi | Apr 4, 2009 |  The Voyage of the Narwhal is the fictional story of the Narwhal and its expedition to rescue the Franklin expedition. The story starts in May of 1855 through August of 1858. We also learn about Lavinia and Alexandra, the sister and friend left behind the Narwhal in Philadelphia. This story explores people's dreams and desires as well as the restrictions of class, the battle with obsessions, and the clash of different cultures. I like how this story ends on a haunting note that almost makes the whole book. There is also a bit of a love story underneath all the adventure and difficulties encountered. This story is a keeper and gets the big thumbs up. ( ) scarpettajunkie | Mar 23, 2009 | It's like The Terror but determined to be an Important Novel (yes, it was written first, but I read The Terror first and so was biased that way), and consequently frankly less interesting. Also, an Important Novel should not pull the same "Inuits as symbols of The Mysterious Land The White Man Cannot Master as opposed to, you know, human characters" shtick. Though, to be fair, the white characters were all pretty one-dimensional too: the Amoral Glory Seeker; the Noble Peasant Boy; the Sensitive Scientist; the Faithful Woman Left Behind, etc. atheist_goat | Mar 12, 2009 | I loved reading this author’s short fiction about scientists in Ship Fever, when I found this online for little money I bought it. This novel is about a fictional naturalist with the great name Erasmus Darwin Wells going on an exploring ship to the Arctic a few years after Franklin disappeared. He travels with a boyhood friend, Zeke, with more ambition than sense. The trip, from the first seems doomed. They meet Inuit with trinkets from Franklin’s ship, just miss Kane (another Arctic explorer) by days, and have to winter in the Arctic. With the crew ready to mutiny Zeke goes off by himself, forcing Erasmus to get them home. The ship is iced in, they can’t get the specimens he’s been collecting and Zeke allowed Erasmus’ good friend the doctor to die. But Erasmus does get them home. This is great book, a novel of ideas, about what science and discovery is all about. ( ) anyanwubutler | Oct 11, 2008 | I discovered Andrea Barrett via this thoroughly researched narrative about 19th-century Arctic exploration, and she's now one of the authors whose work I snap up as soon as it appears in hardback. Her talent is in combining science with literature in a fascinating and accessible way. Here she manages to combine 19th-century concerns (emancipation of slaves, theories of evolution, an obsession with the Arctic) with more modern ones -- the role of women (who have to stay at home and wait), personal growth, cultural imperialism, and how 'truth' is relative. She reminds me of George Eliot in the way that she takes a generous view even of the least admirable characters. Early in the novel, her main character, Erasmus Wells, a repressed and unsuccessful 40-something naturalist, writes: "If I drew that scene I'd show everything happening at once ... But when I describe it in words one thing follows another and everything's shaped by my single pair of eyes, my single voice. I wish I could show it as if through a fan of eyes. Widening out from my single perspective to several viewpoints, then many, so the whole picture might appear and not just my version of it." This is how the novel is written -- it doesn't always work (notably in the case of trying to put across the experience of an Eskimo woman transplanted to Philadelphia). But it does give you a sense of the many different versions of reality, and it is beautifully written. ( )1  veronicay | Sep 25, 2008 | 
 Barrett's marvelous achievement is to have reimagined so graphically that cusp of time when Victorian certainty began to question whether it could encompass the world with its outward-bound enthusiasm alone -- when it started to glimpse the dark ballast beneath the iceberg's dazzling tip.  It's been a long time since an American novel appeared that's as stately and composed as Andrea Barrett's "The Voyage of the Narwhal," the fictional account of a 19th century Arctic expedition and its aftermath that doubles also as a meditation on the nature of adventure and the scientific mind. In "The Voyage of the Narwhal," she has shaped a compelling narrative around the golden age of Arctic exploration, written in the spirit, if not the length or the exact style, of a 19th century novel -- solid, unhurried, reflective and totally wedded to plot. Barrett tells her story through multiple voices -- Erasmus, Zeke, their colleagues, the crew and the women waiting patiently at home -- but "Voyage of the Narwhal" is her own creation, marvelously imagined and beautifully told. A first-rate novel and a welcome, old-fashioned read. Like "Ship Fever," "Narwhal" showcases Ms. Barrett's gifts for extracting high drama from the complex world of science and natural history and for placing her characters in situations that reveal their fundamental natures. Indeed, "Narwhal" is an adventure story in the way that Conrad's "Lord Jim" and "The Nigger of the Narcissus" are adventure stories: the story's extreme conditions and harrowing experiences, which make for such gripping reading, are actually moral and spiritual tests that strip away the characters' public masks and expose their innermost drives and fears.
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And what of the women left behind? Lavinia knows little of the dangers of ice (though she's well schooled in isolation) and lives only for Zeke's return. Her companion, Alexandra Copeland, is less sanguine. Even after she's been given a secret career break--ghosting for an ailing engraver--she knows how invisible she is and how threatening her family's "dense net of obligations" will always be. Though they get less page time, Barrett is in fact as concerned with these women as she is with her seafarers. Like the heroines of her National Book Award-winning Ship Fever, who bump up against science and history in which only men's triumphs are written, they must somehow escape social tyranny or retreat into the consolations of storytelling or silence.
There is tyranny on board the Narwhal as well, as Zeke alternates between good will and paranoia, his closest companion an arctic fox he has "civilized" and who sits on his shoulder "like a white epaulet." (Alas, Sabine, like many of the men, is not to survive the journey.) Encounters with the Esquimaux--who might know more about the lost expedition than they're willing to share--not having gone according to plan, Zeke determines in late August to head for Smith Sound rather than home, despite the crew's protests. By mid-September, however, the craft is ice-locked, and it's clear they'll have to "winter over." At first the men make the best of their situation, magically sculpting cottages, castles, palaces, even a whale--and offering informal seminars in butchery, Bible studies, and basic navigation. However, as the weather worsens and Zeke grows increasingly despotic, morale plummets.
Barrett excels in both physical and social description, writing with a naturalist's precision and a passionate imagination. With quick strokes (backed up by intense research), she can fill us in on some sensible but threatening Esquimaux footgear: "All five were dressed in fur jackets and breeches, with high boots made from the leg skins of white bears. The men's feet, Erasmus saw, were sheltered by the bears' feet, with claws protruding like overgrown human toenails. Walking, the men left bear prints on the snow." The author also shines in panoramic scenes--her descriptions of the Arctic can only be called magnificent--and in small, precarious, personal moments. When Erasmus eventually returns to Philadelphia, minus his toes and his future brother-in-law, a grieving Lavinia takes to her bed. Eventually, however, she relents: "Lavinia stared straight ahead. Straight at Erasmus, her right hand tucked in her lap while her left turned a silver spoon back to front, front to back, the reflections melting, re-forming, and melting again.... Lavinia said softly, 'I forgive you.' Everyone knew she was speaking to Erasmus."
The Voyage of the Narwhal is full of blood-freezing surprises, a score of indelible characters, and heart-stopping mysteries. As Erasmus watches Alexandra draw landscapes he has seen before but missed something in, each pencil stroke is "like a chisel held to a cleavage plane: tap, tap, and the rock split into two sharp pieces, the world cracked and spoke to him." Readers of Andrea Barrett's novel will experience this sensation again and again. Packed with harsh truths about the not-always-true art of discovery, it is also among the most emotionally wrenching, subtle works of the century. --Kerry Fried
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400)
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