Arctic castaways

Steve Heighton has drawn on the Polaris Expedition to create a novel of big ideas and beautiful language,

Why do readers keep returning to the poles? Here we are, 97 years from Robert Peary's spiking of the North, 95 years from Roald Amundsen's dash to the South, and still we can't get enough of those grim men and their frozen beards. The Worst Journey in the World remains a steady seller nearly a century after its author, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, returned from Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Antarctic expedition. The Endurance, Caroline Alexander's masterful account of Ernest Shackleton's 1914-16 survival epic, must be counted among the past decade's most popular works of nonfiction.

Much of the allure, I think, lies in the natural narrative structure of these tales. In the best polar rippers – that is, those in which things go dreadfully wrong – the classic hero's journey bookends a desperate struggle for survival. Out of that struggle come answers to questions both fundamental and deliciously macabre: What are the limits of human endurance? At what point does the rickety architecture of civilization collapse? When do you eat your shoe? What about that fatty first-mate?

These issues and others are tackled by Steven Heighton in his ambitious second novel, Afterlands. Heighton is a Canadian writer whose well-received first novel, The Shadow Boxer, chronicled the coming-of-age of a struggling writer.

But in Afterlands, Heighton travels far from the territory of the bildungsroman to tell the story of the disastrous Polaris Expedition, an 1871 exploration of the Arctic led by the American Charles Francis Hall.

Things began well for Hall. The Polaris sailed farther north than any ship before her, to the head of Baffin Bay between Ellesmere Island and the west coast of Greenland. Then misfortune struck. Hall died of a sudden illness. During a storm, 19 members of the expedition became separated from the ship. Trapped on a large ice floe, they drifted south and never saw the Polaris again. That's where the central action of Afterlands pretty much begins – with the group adrift the morning after separation.

The Polaris and the castaway 19 actually existed. In Afterlands, Heighton extrapolates from historical accounts of the crew's six-and-a-half-month journey aboard the ice floe to create a sophisticated, densely layered fictional exploration of survival, love, betrayal and the personal cost of history. At the centre of the drama lies Lt George Tyson, the ranking officer. An insecure commander, Tyson has poor instincts and a habit of trusting them too often. With him are nine Inuit (known in the 1870s as Esquimaux), led by an expert hunter, Ebierbing, whom the seamen call Joe, and his wife, Tukulito, or Hannah. Rounding out the group are nine crew members, mostly German, including the ship's meteorologist, Frederick Meyer, and a freethinking sailor named Roland Kruger.

If you're going to survive half the year on an ice floe it helps to have boats, dogs and food, and Tyson's castaways begin with all three. The peculiar circumstances of their stranding (the ice cracked after they had unloaded the imperiled Polaris) leave them with 500 pounds of biscuit as well as pemmican, coffee and chocolate. Thus assured of sustenance (at least temporarily), the men play games of euchre while awaiting the ship's return.

Of course, the ship does not return. So Joe builds igloos, including one for the officers, one for his family and one for the crew. Tyson rations the food and the men start to grumble. Morale suffers. Instead of rallying the troops, Tyson retreats with his flask. The party tries for shore, but is forced back by a fierce gale – an ill-conceived effort that breaks the men and shatters Tyson's command. Defying the screaming lieutenant, the men openly raid their food stores and chop one of their two whaleboats into firewood.

"We appear to be drifting into a future where all and any barriers of rank will be broken down," Tyson writes, "and where there is no authority, there can be no order; where there is no order, no survival." Into this vacuum steps Meyer, the expedition's meteorologist, who whips up a nationalist mutiny and declares part of the ice floe German territory. Trapped between the delusional Meyer and the ineffectual Tyson, Kruger assumes the role of peacemaker and suffers mightily for it. The Germans ostracise him as a traitor to the fatherland, while Tyson misreads his diplomatic suggestions as the temptations of a spy. Weeks pass, the ice floe shrinks, and life degenerates into a maelstrom of conspiracy and deception.

Heighton is an experienced adventurer in literary form, having already written poetry, essays, short stories and a novel, and edited two anthologies. It's hardly surprising, then, that a sense of boldness and risk-taking infuses Afterlands. The book opens with vignettes featuring some of the Polaris survivors after their return to civilisation, so the reader knows from the start that Tyson has survived to write a widely read account of the ordeal that features himself as hero and Kruger as villain. Heighton then backtracks to tell the tale of life on the ice floe by alternating between the fictional god's-eye of an omniscient narrator and selections based on Tyson's real-life account (published as Arctic Experiences by Harper & Brothers in 1874). The strategy pays off handsomely. In the gap between reality and memoir, Tyson reveals himself as an obtuse man capable of enormous self-deception.

Tyson's memoir dominates the book, but it's the German immigrant Kruger who gains the author's – and the reader's – greatest sympathy. Kruger finds himself in a timeless dilemma, caught between truth and loyalty. The increasingly mad Meyer takes command by playing upon the German heritage shared by so many of the crew members; he all but establishes World War I more than 40 years before the fact. Kruger resists this mindless nationalism, recalling Goethe's bid to be a "patriot only to truth", but that leaves him a lonely man. "Perhaps it's better," he thinks, "to belong after all."

In late April, after a winter adrift, a passing Newfoundland sealer rescues the castaways. The Polaris survivors enjoy a brief celebrity; then Tyson's memoir comes out and destroys whatever truth existed back on the ice. No one suffers more than Kruger, who flees to Mexico to escape the infamy. "Think of surviving such a sustained assault by Nature," he tells himself, "only to find it brutally renewed by Society!" As often happens, one man's history becomes, to the rest of the expedition, self-serving mendacity.

The Polaris expedition remains a minor footnote in the annals of Arctic exploration, but Heighton has used it to create a novel of big ideas and beautiful language. It can't have been easy for a poet to exercise restraint in a 400-page book set in the Arctic (so many ways to describe white!), but he picks his moments well, offering quiet bits of dazzle in perfect moderation. The crewmen sleeping head-to-foot are "dueling pistols in a lined case". The Inuit woman Hannah, the object of both Tyson and Kruger's unrequited affections, speaks English well but haltingly, "each word placed as carefully as a foot along a seacliff path".

Afterlands is well titled. This is a magnificent novel about the wreckage of history – both the history that happens to us and the versions of it we create.

©New York TImes