The Voyage Of The Narwhal

By John Skow

As she did in her stunning book Ship Fever, a collection of moody historical meditations cast as short stories, the author of this powerful, brooding novel sets up camp in the mid-19th century and forages for the bones of fiction. She picks an obsession--the search in the high Arctic for a northwest passage to the Pacific--that now seems bizarre. Ships were crushed. Men died of scurvy, watched by healthy Inuit tribesmen who were scorned as beasts. Ill-fated expeditions followed, intent on rescue, science or glory. One of these is Barrett's stage, on which two sharply opposed men, a bookish naturalist and a flamboyant expedition chief, struggle for the right to tell, or embellish, shabby truths. The chief ships an Inuit boy and his mother to the U.S., live specimens, and there she dies. That the naturalist manages to return the boy to his people is no victory, but merely--in a novel that moves like an advancing ice age--a partial payment of shame.

--John Skow