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True North by Gavin Francis (view source)
Revision as of 09:44, 8 February 2017
, 09:44, 8 February 2017no edit summary
Sure, I'd have liked better maps, and I'd have perhaps liked Francis to venture east beyond the Russian border to the Kola peninsula with its grim tales of Stalinist times, maybe even Nova Zemlya or at least the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk which he mentions but in passing. But I'm greedy here and perhaps it would have changed the nature of ''True North''. One of the most appealing aspects of the book is how fundamentally at home Francis seems in all the places he visits. Not ''at home'' the way we are in the country and town we come from, but a bigger kind of ''at home'', shared by those who share a common cultural heritage and travel similar mental landscapes: and for the Europeans, the lands under the Great Bear have marked the far edge of those landscapes for more than two millennia.
Francis' [[Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence and Emperor Penguins by Gavin Francis|Empire Antarctica]] was awarded the Scottish Book of the Year 2013 prize and shortlisted for Costa, Banff, Saltire & Ondaatje Awards, and his 2015 ''Adventures in Human Being'' also made it onto a few distinguished lists. I haven't read those but if they are anything like this one, I am in for two treats. But the one tale that ''True North'' really reminded me of was a novel, Peter Hoeg's [[Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow]] with its picture of Greenland and Greenlanders. Strangely, there are more British books about Antarctic than the Arctic (a phenomenon Francis mentions in ''True North'') and in addition to his own mentioned above, the Southern Pole mythos and reality are explored in [[The Ice-Cold Heaven by Mirko BonnBonne]], [[1912: The Year the World Discovered Antarctica by Chris Turney]], [[Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scott and Amundsen by Roland Huntford]] and another novel: [[Death on the Ice by Robert Ryan]]. Intrepid young polar travellers should check out [[Serious Survival: How to Poo in the Arctic and Other Essential Tips for Explorers by Marshall Corwin]] while [[The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic by Sara Wheeler]] and [[Boundless: Adventures in the Northwest Passage by Kathleen Winter]] are modern Artic travelogues that focus on non-European parts of the North. And finally, I must mention [[Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive]], where the Norse settlements in Greenland, Iceland, Shetland and the Faroes are given a somewhat controversial but interesting treatment by Jared Diamond, if only because Francis mentions Diamond's ideas in ''True North'' and manages to refute some of them quite convincingly.
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