THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 5, 1995 TAG: 9502020304
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY PEGGY DEANS EARLE
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines
ANTARCTIC NAVIGATION
ELIZABETH ARTHUR
Alfred A. Knopf. 798 pp. $25.
WHEN SHE WAS 5 years old, Morgan Lamont had a dream.
She saw herself in the middle of a frozen river, surrounded by whiteness. Five ghostly men gradually appeared. The leader was trying to tell her something, but she couldn't understand. He held ski poles and wore a strange wool helmet and odd little goggles. As Morgan approached him, he vanished along with his companions.
Later, Morgan's mother gave her a picture-filled book called Scott's Last Voyage. There, the little girl learned about the English explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his race with Norwegian Roald Amundsen to the South Pole.
She read about how Scott's 1912 arrival at the Pole met with failure, and how he and his four-man party perished in the cold.
Those images and that story so bewitched Morgan, an obsession was born that would ultimately lead her to the farthest point south, her heart's desire: the ``Ice.''
Elizabeth Arthur's fourth novel, Antarctic Navigation, is the story of one woman's longing to explore the ``highest, driest, coldest continent on earth'' and to duplicate the expedition of the quixotic man who died 50 years before she was born. The book is epic in size and scope. Though it takes too many detours, it always manages to find its way back to the main path.
Morgan narrates the story in the form of a report to Peter Scott, the explorer's son. She tells of her life: her childhood in Colorado; her parents' divorce and her father's departure; her mother's remarriage to a compulsive chemistry professor whom Morgan despises. And, of course, the story of Scott and his doomed expedition.
She vows to re-create Scott's trek, to ``prove that . . . Scott needn't have been a failure.'' But it's more than that. She wants to find that March of 1912 and Scott himself, ``to place him on my own back, carry him out, across the Great Barrier, all the way to the shores of Cape Evans, the shores of Antarctica.''
As she grows up, Morgan meets the eccentric people who will comprise her polar team. There's Wilbur, a childhood friend with an uncanny ability to understand animals and predict the weather. There's Brock, Morgan's complicated lover who suffers from a peculiar form of motion sickness. And Winnie, a former cowgirl and winner of two consecutive Iditarod dog races.
Morgan's first visit to the continent, as a government employee at McMurdo Station, lives up to her expectations: ``Antarctica was more beautiful, and more spiritual, than anything I had seen before . . . something which changed my definitions of the possible . . . It gives you the eyes of a child.''
Two of the many starkly beautiful passages in the book occur at this time: an account of meeting a flock of penguins and later, a seal colony.
After her return, Morgan endures her mother's progressive mental deterioration and death. Enter Morgan's paternal grandfather. A millionaire, he offers to finance her expedition.
Years of preparation lead Morgan and her team to Cape Evans, Scott's preserved Terra Nova hut, and the Ice - with time out for an affair with an Argentine Greenpeace scientist, Fidel.
When she reaches the Pole, she echoes Scott's remark upon his arrival: ``Great God! This is an awful place.''
And what does Morgan find there?
``Compared to myth, compared to the power of the imagination, reality was . had yearned to find, was not going to be there when I got to it. Something would be there, but it would not be my place.''
Arthur speaks with genuine authority. In 1990, she took part in the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program under the auspices of the National Science Foundation, spending several weeks on the Ice.
Throughout her narrative, she takes on a variety of topics, perhaps too ambitiously: the Exxon Valdez disaster, the Persian Gulf war, a range of ecological dangers. But her love and knowledge of her subject and lyrical writing style make the book fascinating, entertaining and educational.
Readers will come away with a sense of having been given a glittering gift: an appreciation and respect for an awesome, awful place, the likes of which most of us will never see. Except, perhaps, in a dream.
- MEMO: Peggy Deans Earle is a staff librarian and longtime armchair
adventurer.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
MARION ETTLINGER
In her fourth novel, Elizabeth Arthur writes with authority about
the South Pole.
by CNB