Part survival horror, part historical fiction, part training manual for arctic naval expeditions, part Jaws on Ice, Dan Simmons’s The Terror is a peculiar book. The story (though I didn’t know this until after I finished it) is a heavily fictionalized account of the voyage of two real ships from the British Navy, the Erebus and the Terror, to seek the Northwest Passage amid the frozen arctic seas above Canada during the mid-1840s. Bouncing from character to character to present a spectrum of viewpoints, primarily from officers and petty officers, its main narrative thrust is provided by a rigorous accounting of the logistics of such an expedition, and an equally meticulous cataloguing of the myriad paths it takes to disaster: subzero temperatures, treacherous ice, frightening storms and blizzards, food poisoning, scurvy, fire, starvation, murder, and most importantly, alpha predators. I don’t want to tip the book’s hand any more than that, but suffice it to say that the men come to believe–indeed have already come to believe, given the book’s initial in medias res set-up–that a “thing on the ice” is stalking them, with intentions more malevolent than mere predation and abilities more deadly than (literally) the average bear.

The book is very, very long, probably way longer than it needed to be; all those technical terms about ice conditions and parts of the ship and who answers to whom on board eat up page after page. Yet I don’t recall ever feeling bored, or coming to a point where I felt “that right there–that could have been cut.” I couldn’t imagine writing a book stuffed with that much technical detail, let alone making an entertaining genre effort out of it, but Simmons makes it feel so smooth that you hardly notice how stuffed to the gills it is with the fruits of his research, even if you don’t know a serac from a fo’c’sle. But maybe that’s the problem with it: It’s constructed in such a way that every detail seems equally vital, meaning that nothing ultimately is vital. I suppose the slow avalanche of detail is in its way evocative of the day-by-day grind the arctic conditions, natural and otherwise, take on the men and their ships, but compared to something like The Ruins or the Barker and King short stories of which that book is reminiscent, that palpable panicked breakdown momentum is missing; here it’s more a resigned despair. Which is valid, I suppose, but to me less compelling.

Certain elements do stand out against that blinding white background. For one thing, Simmons has a refreshing tendency to zig when you expect him to zag with his characters. A racist stuffed shirt turns out to have risked his career to help abused prisoners; a stereotypical evil homosexual is offset by the introduction of two lovers who are among both the noblest, smartest, and most psychologically complicated members of the crew; a cynical drunk turns out to be a stoic mensch; a squaresville naif delivers the most memorable and cutting rebuff to the book’s bad guys in the whole novel. While the book is never scary in the keep-you-up-at-night sense, the thought of wrestling with the notion that you are most likely going to freeze or starve or rot to death over slow months and years on the ice if you don’t get eaten first can certainly give you something to stew about as you drift off to sleep. And there are memorable horror visuals both operatic (the Carnivale) and insidiously subtle (what the sledge party sees off in the distance throughout their trek). Finally, like those characters, the whole book takes a wild trip off into left field for its final act, something hinted at only slightly by a pair of feints in that direction much earlier on (the first of which, now that I think of it, would have been much better left unrevealed until this final act). To me, this was the book’s best, most unique, and ballsiest section, beating out even the cat-and-mouse suspense of its long-running mutiny subplot. The only problem is that it rather completely undercuts the book’s menace, and that is a very big problem. After all, whether you’re referring to the thing on the ice or the fear of oblivion, you’re talking about the title character here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.