Boundless: Adventures in the Northwest Passage by Kathleen Winter
| Boundless: Adventures in the Northwest Passage by Kathleen Winter | |
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| Category: Travel | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: An intelligent, compelling and accessible look at world on board a Russian ice-breaker taking the Northwest Passage west across the north of the Americas. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 288 | Date: February 2016 |
| Publisher: Vintage | |
| ISBN: 9780099587194 | |
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Luck has a lot to do with this world. It was probably luck that let Kathleen Winter fill the post of unofficial writer-in-residence on a ship coursing through the Northwest Passage. It was doubtless luck that someone had told her to be ready and packed to accept any invite life might give you, only days beforehand. Some fortune meant she had grown up in Newfoundland, and so knew the weather, conditions and liminal locations and wildlife she might encounter. It's bad luck that between when she travelled, in 2010, and filled her pages with talk of Sir John Franklin's lost boats and lost bones, and 2016, when I read this paperback version of the results, his prime ship has been found (if not what people allege will be revealed). It's vitally fortuitous, however, that someone with her writing nous was able to travel the waters before something else, much more permanent, changed – the heinous climate change problems that are certainly upsetting the world up there.
Of all those chances, I like to think of that delay the least. So vivid is the picture Winter conveys, of herself in her cabin, writing her notes and journals alongside a Japanese colleague – with her bunk being about the level of the Arctic waters outside – that you really do feel these are the echt notes of her days on board and on shore excursions. There is a narrative here – a dismissive look at Greenland (the villages are too Danish-influenced, it seems), before a meander through the waters off Canada that claimed pioneering lives long before the modern ice-breakers managed to swan through – but equally the chapters here work as self-contained essays. And quite impressionistic those essays are too – quite early on we're exposed to autobiography, including the Winter pater moving his family from the English NE to the American NE. One chapter looks at not only the usual cruise relationship of the diner at the captain's table, with the nature of this particular skipper and his relationship with the world his work consists of, but also social dancing. A lot of the second half is more or less about the small-p politics of even being there.
But while that might put the fear of god into the potential buyer, rest assured this impressionistic approach works. (It also means the American subtitle, Tracing Land and Dream in a New Northwest Passage bears much more relevance than mention of Adventures.) Here is dialogue about underwear, here some semblance of actual travel reportage, and the feel of shore visits, but mostly the writing conveys accurately the idea that sounds, smells and wordless pictures are the only way to put the nature of the world up there across. The good thing to report, however, is that nowhere does the writing show the labours for the right mots juste, the perfect (Arctic) turns of phrase and a high, crafted literacy. There is still a lot of freshness on these pages, despite the time between the happening and you reading about it. And that freshness is not down to luck.
But I did feel at times the author was shy of a bit of effort. I got just a few images of Greenland, as if the photographic record had been heavily culled. I didn't particularly feel I was feeling the wind on my face, or the cold cabin exterior wall against my berth. I felt the anger in the unnecessary 'progress' found in some communities, but didn't see the faces of the people facing it without the photo section. I don't have a clue yet what minced seal brain tastes like (actually, scratch that one, I just don't care to know). And for all the evocative stuff here, I still feel a little bit short-changed. This book is no substitute for going there, and meeting a similar crew on a similar boat and seeing, hearing, smelling, it all for yourself. Just my luck.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence and Emperor Penguins by Gavin Francis is the same approach taken about the polar opposite location.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Boundless: Adventures in the Northwest Passage by Kathleen Winter at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy Boundless: Adventures in the Northwest Passage by Kathleen Winter at Amazon.com.
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