Keneally’s short novel reminded me a little of an early Sergio Blanco play I saw last year. (Was it last year? Time seems to have succumbed to snowblindness of late.) The play was about a group of people stranded on the Arctic ice, who gradually pick each other off. The premise of a murder mystery in a snowbound wasteland, where every track is a clue, where just to go outside means to risk your life, has allure, but is very hard to pull off. In part because of the restrictions of this world. Keneally’s high Edwardian tale is set on the expedition of Captain Sir Eugene Stewart to the South Pole, as narrated by the expedition painter, Anthony Piers, who in a framing device is recounting the story from his Californian nursing home, sixty years later. The expedition journalist is murdered and Piers is tasked by Stewart to find out who did it. The ingredients, which include forays into the scientific and artistic goals of the expedition, as well as premonitions of the Great War, make for a rich blend. Yet this is a slight book, over almost before it has begun, and the shards of brilliance which sometimes penetrate the text also have the effect of illuminating the way in which the novel is, to a certain extent, coasting, drifting over its material without ever seeking to explore what it all means. At one point the narrator notes that in the Antarctic, seven million cubic miles of ice lie on top of the six million square miles of the continent. What lies beneath the surface is as vast and important as that which lies above, but no matter how entertaining, the novel rarely succeeds in sending a plumb line below, to explore those hidden depths.
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