Overview

`A great, shivery, seductive read.’ Elle Intelligent, accessible literary fiction of the highest order. Superbly dramatic and beautifully readable. A terrific tale of high endeavour and polar peril, this is the story of a scientific expedition to the Arctic in 1855 and the women the explorers left behind. A brilliant portrait of Victorian society obsessed with mapping and classifying everything under the sun – including the icy Arctic – where the emancipation of women and the evolution of species are the next great revolutions just stirring into life.

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9780006551416

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'The clarity and depth of the story dazzle' The Times 'Enthralling, rivetingly authentic' Literary Review 'Crammed full of rich, pictorial description and tingling suspense.' New York Times 'Among the most emotionally wrenching, subtle works of the century' amazon.com

Barrett's impeccably researched and stunningly written tale of a star-crossed Arctic voyage - a logical successor to such earlier fiction as The Forms of Water (1993) and the National Book Award-winning Ship Fever - is, simply, one of the best novels of the decade. In a flexible, lucid prose that effortlessly communicates detailed information about navigation, natural history, and several related disciplines, Barrett tells the increasingly moving story of naturalist Erasmus Darwin Wells's ordeals: First, when he's on an 1855 expedition in search of explorer Sir John Franklin's lost crew, an expedition led by Erasmus's rash, ego-driven future brother-in-law, Zechariah Voorhees; and second, when Erasmus's desertion of their ship (the Narwhal) and the presumed death of the missing Zeke poisons his reunion with his bereaved sister Lavinia and deepens his own fear that his life amounts to a history of failure. The narrative of the Narwhal's exhausting, repetitive odyssey is artfully varied by Barrett's sympathetic concentration on Erasmus's mixture of stoic dutifulness and excruciating self-doubt, and by her vivid portrayals of such secondary characters as ship's cook Ned Kynd (a survivor of Ireland's Potato Famine), its surgeon (and Erasmus's revered soulmate) Jan Boerhaave, Lavinia's paid companion Alexandra Coleman (instrumental in Erasmus's eventual recall to life), and the Arctic Highlanders, whose inability to endure civilization rewrites all the explorers' and scientists' theories. Zeke himself - a megalomaniac with striking resemblances to Melville's Ahab - is the fulcrum on which Barrett springs a dazzling surprise that gives her disturbing climactic pages an almost symphonic richness. The intellectual range exhibited by this magnificent novel places its author in the rarefied company of great contemporary encyclopedic writers like Pynchon, Gaddis, and Harry Mulisch. One yearns for Barrett to treat in such exemplary detail the story of Jemmy Button, the Tierra del Fuegan Indian returned to London after Darwin's voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle. You feel she could do full justice to it, or indeed whatever subject she chooses. (Kirkus Reviews)

There's nothing as stirring as a good seafaring tale. The beckoning horizon, the unfathomable depths, the battle between man and the sea, all lend themselves to fabulous fiction. But this book is far more than an adventure yarn. Erasmus Darwin Wells is a naturalist on the Narwhal. It's the 1850s, and they're heading North to determine what happened to polar explorer Franklin and his men. Erasmus is our narrator and our eyes. We sail along with him, burying fellow crew members, suffering scurvy and getting trapped through the sunless winter in the never-ending ice. Erasmus is the best kind of hero, because he is flawed and horribly human. Just when he is supposed to be proving his Victorian manliness as a member of an exploratory expedition, he is scared, troubled and unsure. As dense and as detailed as Moby Dick, The Voyage of the Narwhal takes a classic tale of exploration and turns it into an intimate account of one man's personal journey. (Kirkus UK)

'The clarity and depth of the story dazzle' The Times 'Enthralling, rivetingly authentic' Literary Review 'Crammed full of rich, pictorial description and tingling suspense.' New York Times 'Among the most emotionally wrenching, subtle works of the century' amazon.com

Author Information

Andrea Barrett lives in upstate New York. This is her fifth book, but her first to be published in the British Commonwealth.

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