Antarctic Navigation

Young girl with lifetime fascination with Antarctica grows up as young scholar who abandons her dissertation to lead an expedition to recreate Robert Falcon Scott's 1910 fatal race to the South Pole. It takes 200 fascinating pages (out of 800) just to get there, but every page is worth the wait. Lyric, introspective, sometimes hilarious, richly detailed, its hard to believe this is a novel and not a memoir.

I feel like reading this book has been a long, long journey. It's not the kind of novel where the plot drags you along; the author takes every chance to branch off into musings about politics, religion, science, mythology, empire, etc. That said, I think that's the intention of the book - the plot is just a very light framework for all of these diversions.

It's beautifully written, and the sort of book that no doubt would well repay frequent rereading, dipping in a little at a time.

Some good description of the icy scenery and reactions to it, especially at the bodily level. But it doesn't really grip until things start to go wrong.Till that point, which is nearly the end of the book, it has a touch of "Five go to the Antarctic", i.e. everybody is too naïve and too nice. Ambitious, but falls short. Wrong word, it's far too long, an all too frequent fault, especially among US writers. The heroine doesn't even touch the Antarctic till page 300. And while the editor was cutting, they might have corrected some of the many minor errors, such as misspelling Huntley & Palmer biscuits and calling a Zen rishi Chinese. There's a lot of pseudo-philosophical physicsy stuff which gets in the way and I wonder how accurate that show more is, given that she seems not to know the difference between the 4th and 5th dimensions. Even the lyricists of "Hair" got that one right.
I did stay the course, nearly 800 pages, because I share the heroine's dream of going to the Antarctic in Scott's footsteps. show less

This is one of those books that deserves to be re-read, many times. It is beautifully written with vivid detail throughout the story. I picked up the book because of its subject matter (Antarctica), but I fell in love with the lead character and her life-long ambition to lead an expedition to the South Pole. This is a book for the ages, all of them.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, except for the ending. It didn't seem like the ending this book needed.