Terror

The Terror by Dan Simmons, 766 pages

The year is 1848.  Over a hundred men are spending their second winter trapped in their two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, off the coast of King William Island.  They are surrounded by ice, wind, and darkness.  They are running low on food, rum, and coal.  Worst of all, they are being hunted by a preternatural creature strong enough to tear a man in half and clever enough to sneak onto the very decks of their ships.  Nearly as mysterious is the young Esquimaux woman the crew call Lady Silence, who may or may not know something about these men and their fates, but whose tongue was bitten off at the root by someone or something long ago. 

The Terror falls prey to some of the cliches of historical fiction.  There's an extended passage in which a character expounds on the as yet unpublished theories of Darwin with which he is implausibly (though not impossibly) familiar, and Simmons only barely avoids turning his Inuit into noble savages.  The monster, being an unstoppable killing machine with an unknown origin and purpose, is unavoidably reminiscent of similar figures in Simmons' science fiction novels.  In another novel the monster would be a center of tension, something that can be directly faced and overcome in a way that cold and darkness cannot, but Simmons establishes fairly early on that nothing the sailors can do will more than temporarily inconvenience the creature.  When answers are provided, it is in the form of an exposition dump that could have been copy-pasted from some alternate universe's Dictionary of Inuit Mythology.  Nor do the characters provide much interest, for while a few are genuinely memorable, they have little to do except suffer through hundreds of pages of detailed descriptions of frostbite and scurvy, and the reader is invited to suffer alongside them.

And yet.

The final hundred pages are compelling in a way they could not have been without the long tale of thwarted adventure and dreary survival that preceded them.  It could perhaps have been more artfully done, but that it was done at all is a marvel and a gift.

Fishermen with Ploughs

Fishermen with Ploughs by George MacKay Brown, from The Collected Poems of George MacKay Brown, 58 pages

Fishermen with Ploughs, a collection first published in 1971, is a poetical-historical tour of the Orkney Isles, where the author makes his home.  It begins with the arrival of Norse settlers fleeing trouble at home, drifts through Christianization and Reformation and Modernization, when so many native Orcadians left for greener pastures elsewhere, then concludes in the near future with new refugees fleeing some fresh disaster renewing the cycle.

If not for the introduction, however, only the keenest of readers would have unriddled that plot.  The contents vary greatly in length and style, giving brief glimpses of the isles and their inhabitants in a land where man and nature interpenetrate.  Songs of mothers and widows and graves dug in the sea, the books of the earth and the seas of corn, the plough of the boat's prow and the sea salt on the wind, hearts like stones and stones like men, the year and the week and the days going round, the great ghostly crowds of those who have gone before but are here still in wall and path and churchyard.

Calendar of Love

A Calendar of Love and Other Stories by George Mackay Brown, 157 pages

A collection of short stories set in the author's beloved Orkney Islands, exploring the landscape and the people who inhabit it.  There are tavern keepers, tinkers, Sikh merchants, Vikings, priests, madmen secular and religious, many sailors, and many wives and lovers of sailors.  There is sadness, treachery, tragedy, drunkenness, repentance, and joy.  

The portrait of a pastoral human community full of flawed characters occasionally illuminated by grace provokes obvious comparisons with William Faulkner, Wendell Berry, and Sholem Aleichem.  Brown, better known as a poet, has a straightforward prose style and an ease with plot that keeps his stories from ever feeling forced.

Treasure Island

Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, 311 pages

I realized that the only version of Treasure Island or A Christmas Carol that I was really familiar with were both the Muppet versions... so I am attempting to change that.  Step one was reading the original Treasure Island.  And while it shouldn't be hard to imagine, seeing as it's a classic and all, this book actually stands up to the test of time (mostly).  Young Jim Hawkins finds himself in possession of a treasure map- and there the seafaring and pirate adventure begins.  It's interesting to read this and realize how many current pirate tropes truly originated in this one work- sort of like reading Dracula and realizing its long-lasting effects.  There are quite a bit of nautical and ship terms thrown about that my eyes kind of glazed over in response to, but this is an approachable work of classic fiction for those looking to read an older book.  Also, it's one of those that you can read for free via Project Gutenberg (which is where I read it, so this book cover and pages are an approximation made courtesy of goodreads).