Book: The Magnetic North by Sara Wheeler

It took me a long while to read this book as I read others in between and, as a result, I don't have the most coherent memory of much of it. Still, I finished it tonight. It is an account of the modern Arctic. Sara Wheeler begins most of her nine chapters with a pie-shaped wedge of map, the center of the "pie" always being the North Pole but with different geographic perimeters in each chapter: Russia, the Scandinavian countries, Canada, Greenland and Alaska.

"In Nuuk I saw a pair of nylon panties pegged on a washing line next to a row of curing seal ribs...There was the twenty-year-old Inupiat woman with two children; almost everyone in her family was drunk almost all the time; she had never been out hunting; she ate Western junk food and watched The Simpsons." This theme recurs, sadly, throughout the book in many places.

There are towns with names like Ittoqqortoormitt where "a girl in Wrangler jeans and Nike sneakers drinks Coca-Cola with her sealskin-clad grandmother."

Ms. Wheeler loves the Arctic. Along the way, she tells some history; she tells of the amazing explorations and men who ventured into and through and on the ice, many of whom perished. She says of the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen that he was "an intellectual giant as well as a natural poet" and the author considers him the "presiding spirit of my Arctic story." Of course, I now want to read more of Nansen.

There is a chapter on Greenland, and Wheeler rooms with US scientists working there. Tiny flowers bloom in the Arctic, and she speaks of reindeer, musk oxen, narwhals, mineral exploration, the Lapps, geoscience, pollution, global warming and the extremely brutal gulag on Solovki, an island in the White Sea; she travels the Dalton Highway in Alaska with Jeannie, a lady trucker, and tells of Bob Marshall and John Muir and their experiences in the north.

Each page is filled with a meandering rich narrative, most of it about the land and people (natives and others) who find themselves above the Arctic Circle at 66 degrees north.

I feel I should have taken notes; there is so much of interest in this book in addition to what I have already mentioned. For instance, there is book An African in Greenland by a young self-educated man from Togo by the name of Kpomassie, who finds himself in Greenland after eight years of working his way north from Africa. He did not wish initiation into the cult of the python which was to be his destiny and which prospect was the impetus for his flight from Togo. He writes:

"In the eyes of an Eskimo hunter, the Arctic world with its vast, frozen expanses, its barren, snowy peaks and great, bare plateau--all that drab, white, lifeless immensity of little interest to an African like me--becomes a living world."

So a hundred or more vignettes of the Arctic fill the pages of this book; it is the "next best thing" to traveling there oneself writes Erica Wagner of The Times (London).