Weird and Tragic Shores

The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer

Great title for a fabulous book about a self-made man from Cincinnati who becomes obsessed with the Arctic. In 1860 he mounts a one-man expedition and heads north by bumming a ride on a whaler.

He spends eight years living among the Inuit, first on southern Baffin Island, where he is astonished by tales of Frobisher's visits three centuries before, then on the Arctic mainland where he is thrilled by stories that a few men from Franklin's lost expedition may have survived long after the rest had perished.

Hall returns to the US something of a celebrity, meeting President Grant and Lady Franklin. He writes a book, Life with the Esquimaux, and mounts a new expedition, this time with government backing.

It is a bitter disaster. He dies claiming he's been poisoned, and half the company is marooned on an ice floe for over six months.

This book is a rarity in that it contains much original research without sacrificing readability. It is topped off by the author's visit in 1968 to Greenland, where he exhumes Hall's body. Analysis of hair and fingernail clippings reveal that Hall had ingested toxic amounts of arsenic. Loomis carefully works out the ramifications of this discovery.

Ebierbing and Tookoolito

As remarkable as Hall's story is, equally affecting is that of Ebierbing and Tookoolito, an Inuit couple he met on Baffin Island. They were to remain his companions for the rest of his life. They accompanied him to the US, then back to the Arctic on his second and third expeditions. It was Ebierbing's skills as a hunter that enabled 19 people to survive for the six months they spent on the ice floe drifting south.

Their story is worthy of its own book.

Nostromo

A Tale of the Seaboard

Reading this book, I imagined it as a dark hulk steaming slowly and irrevocably toward a hidden shoal, while the author moved among the passengers and crew, holding up a lantern to illuminate their faces, one by one. The ending arrives with the force of a Greek tragedy.

The novel takes place in Costaguana, a fictional and politically unstable Central American country. Its greatest resource is the blood-soaked San Tomé silver mine, now the focal point of a revolution. Rebels attack Sulaco, a port near the mine, but are overcome at the last moment, allowing the province to separate from Costaguana and become an independent country.

Nearly everyone in the book is tainted by the mine's silver. It becomes a barrier in the marriage of Charles Gould, the administrator, and drives Sotillo mad with greed. It assists in the suicide of Decoud, who fills his pockets with ingots before shooting himself in the chest and falling overboard. Finally, it turns the heroic and incorruptible Nostromo into a skulking thief, resulting in the ruination of the only family he has known.

The book is thus a morality tale about the corrupting influence of material wealth, and a warning about the dangers of imperialism. (Costaguana is partially modeled on Panama, which separated from Columbia in 1903 with the encouragement of the USA. Nostromo was published the following year.)

While the novel is considered one of Conrad's best, it contains an amazing number of improbable events. For example, when Nostromo is charged with spiriting silver out of town to keep it from falling into rebel hands, he collides with Sotillo's ship, the very one he is trying to evade. Even more unlikely, a stowaway on Nostromo's boat is borne away clinging to Sotillo's anchor. These events, together with an unlikely last-minute love affair, contribute directly to Nostromo's downfall.

But that's not all -- several ironies underscore the improbabilities. Nostromo is a surrogate son to old Viola and his wife, and unofficially espoused to the older daughter Linda. Yet he ignores a deathbed request made by Viola's wife (fetch a priest) due to the urgency of transporting the silver out of town; and though he is not present, the woman's last words are addressed directly to him (save the children). Instead he uses Viola and the two girls as a cover for spiriting away the stolen silver, in the course of which he develops a sudden infatuation for the younger daughter, Giselle, and ends up being shot by old Viola, who mistakes him for another suitor, who just happens to be Nostromo's protégé.

There are more improbabilities, too many to be unintentional. It is Conrad stacking the deck against Nostromo, implying that no matter what he does he cannot escape his doom. The question then becomes, can we accept as accurate Conrad's portrait of human existence? Are the improbabilities merely an artistic shaping of events in order to contain his vision within the covers of a book? Or is the vision itself inaccurate, warped by Conrad's gloomy view of life?

Either way, the novel is a gothic edifice.

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Silverland

A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals

"A typical old Irish Leftie" is how Dervla Murphy was once described.

A grandmother in her 70s, she embarks upon her second journey through Siberia. She travels alone, speaks no Russian, and stashes money in her vagina.

This trip seems a little grimmer than the first one. The openness and generosity of many people are counterbalanced by the rudeness and xenophobia of many others. The word "Nyet!" is heard far too often, and there are sad examples of poverty, alcoholism, bureaucratic tangles, and "pollution on a truly sinister scale." Towards the end of the book she is robbed at gunpoint.

Murphy is an engaging, well-read, and plain-speaking traveller. She suffers the occasional hangover, provides apt historical asides, and collects interesting observations from others, such as support for the US invasion of Iraq, the reason for gigantism in Soviet architecture, and the opinion that Russia is "too big for democracy".

For me, two lines sum up the book:

I met no one who could honestly express optimism about Russia's future. Siberia's uninhabited vastness mesmerizes me; as I write these words I long to return.

Details

1. Silverland is a companion volume to Through Siberia by Accident, which recounts the author's abortive attempt to bicycle through the Russian Far East in 2002. She returned in 2004, drawn by Siberian hospitality and such natural wonders as Lake Baikal (a "Hallowed Sea").

2. She travels almost entirely by train -- from Cologne to Moscow with an awkward interruption in Belarus, then over the Urals with stops in Severobaikalsk, Tynda, Komsomolsk-na-Amure, and Vanino. Her return journey takes her through Khabarovsk, Ulan-Ude, and Rostov-on-Don, with a final week in St. Petersburg.

3. She airs some personal views. Bicycle helmets are "wimpish," the IMF has caused "despair and death on three continents," and crematories release dioxins into the air and mercury vapour from dental fillings. She recommends a "woodland" burial -- no coffin, just a winding-sheet of wool or cotton.

4. The book contains a map, bibliography, and four pages (eight sides) of B&W photos.

More Quotes

electric "butter-lamps" tea sweetened with blackcurrent jam the sordid engine room of the capitalist ship that notorious Soviet mix, zealotry and incompetence a society dazzled by but not fully comprehending the workings of capitalism

A Hero of Our Time

The prose in this slim volume is as clear and bracing as a mountain stream.

The book presents five episodes in the life of a Byronic character named Pechorin. The unusual narrative structure allows us to see him first through the eyes of other characters, for whom he is a cipher.

The core of the book, both in terms of length and psychological depth, is the fourth episode, "Princess Mary," which is told in Pechorin's own words. He describes himself as a "moral cripple."

The final piece, "The Fatalist," has an eerie Poe-like quality to it, describing a man with "the mark of death" on his face.

Now examine the cover of the novel above. This is a portrait of Lermontov. Do you see the mark of death on his face?

Lermontov was a soldier as well as a Romantic poet -- brave, dashing, and equipped with a lethal wit. He was twice exiled to the wild Causcasus region, once for a poem he wrote on the death of Pushkin, and the second for fighting a duel. The character of Pechorin is clearly modelled on himself.

Byron (the name comes up several times in the book) was an important influence. Another was Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Pechorin and Onegin (both characters named after rivers) are similarly bored but dangerous men. Both kill a friend in a duel.

The duel in A Hero of Our Time is impossibly Romantic. It takes place on the ledge of a cliff against a backdrop of mountains. Even a wound is likely to prove fatal. A coin is flipped to see who will shoot first. The men are positioned six paces apart, so that a miss is highly unlikely.

Like Pushkin, Lermontov himself was killed in a duel. He died in 1841, the year after A Hero of Our Time was published. He was only 27.

Mikhail Lermontov was the greatest Russian poet of his age, after Pushkin, and his influence on later Russian writers has been great -- Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Pasternak.