I am really, really trying to stick to no book buying before my birthday halfway through the year. I'd forgotten how many temptations come from reading this thread, especially when the latest set of monthly 99p deals hit!
16 Everland, Rebecca Hunt (RWYO)
I don't know if I discovered this via this thread, as I know there are some polar exploration lovers here, or if it just happened into my hand as a second hand paperback. Anyway, it was great and my second bold read of the year.
In 1913, a group of three men set out in a dinghy, an offshoot from a larger antarctic exploration expedition, to take a recce of an unexplored Island that they have named Everland. Disaster hits almost immediately, as a wild storm blows them off course and out of contact with the main ship, landing them on the island injured and with limited provisions.
A hundred years later, a second group land on Everland to mark the centenary of the original landing, and to catalogue and monitor the penguins and seals who stop there to breed.
Both groups are uneasily matched, and bring tensions and personal grievances with them that are teased out slowly over the course of the book. The modern group seem almost ridiculously pampered and safe compared to their earlier counterparts, with plentiful food, medical kits and chatty radio contact with the base station two hours' plane journey away. However, as the harshness of the landscape and the work takes its toll, shifting and unexpected parallels appear between the two groups (whose stories are told in approximately alternating chapters).
We sort of know how the 1913 expedition ends. The book opens with a rescue, and a mysterious disappearance. When we first meet the 2013 group, they are watching a film based on a book about the earlier expedition, and they obviously know "what happened". But of course, nothing is that simple, and there's mystery and dramatic tension as we wait to find out where the story is going with each group. After a slightly confusing start (we're thrown in without much back story), the narrative never drags despite many repetitive hours spent shivering in tents nursing frostbitten extremities and listening to the howling wind (the landscape descriptions are beautifully, bleakly wonderful).
More than this, though, the book slowly but mercilessly reveals its real themes. How tiny decisions can have huge consequences. The nature of courage - who is brave, and whether it's the same as who we think is brave. The fragility of a human existence - not just our physical fragility, but the brief importance of all the tiny details that we carry around with us and which will be forgotten when we're no longer here. And, finally, as Hamilton puts it, who lives, who dies, who tells your story.
Really lovely, if achingly sad.