Arctic Obsession: The Lure of the Far North (review)

A number of books in recent years have sought to offer a summa of the passion for Arctic exploration and its broader cultural meaning, among them Robert McGhee's brilliant The Last Imaginary Place (2005) and Sara Wheeler's well-received The Magnetic North (2010). To this list may now be added Alexis Troubetzkoy's Arctic Obsession, a wide-ranging historical overview that seeks to epitomize the contributions of many eras and nations to the exploration and understanding of the far North. Troubetzkoy is a retired teacher, and as a result, his is perhaps the most readily accessible and engaging of all these accounts. His well-honed folksy tone and lively historical anecdotes must surely have held the attention of even the most enervated students. He opens with up-to-the-minute accounts of recent Russian exploits, such as dropping a titanium flag on the floor of the Arctic Ocean near the precise geographical pole in 2007, but he is just as good with events of a thousand years past, such as the Viking colonization of Greenland. His book is also notable for its breadth, offering as it does accounts of the contributions of English, Russian, American, and Scandinavian explorers. His descriptions of Hudson's and Frobisher's voyages are especially gripping and eminently readable.

Unfortunately, mixed in with this lively narrative are a significant number of historical errors. Individually, they are minor, but collectively they undermine the reader's confidence in the whole. In the chapter on Sir John Franklin, for example, he mistakenly claims the Erebus and Terror were copper-sheathed, that tinned food had just come into use on Franklin's last expedition (in fact it had been employed for more than twenty years); that John Torrington's grave was a 'marble slab' (it was a wooden board), that the cairn at Victory Point was left by William Edward Parry (it was James Clark Ross), and that there had been forty-two search expeditions for Franklin as of the winter of 1850-1 (in fact, there had been just twelve, and would only be thirty-six in total). In a classroom, passion for the subject is far more essential than precision with every detail, but surely a published work of non-fiction ought to be as accurate as its author and editors can make it.

Despite these issues, I would still recommend Troubetzkoy's book for general readers who mainly seek a companionable vade mecum for their northern sojourn; they will be delighted. Nevertheless, before it would be suited for an academic or reference library, Arctic Obsession would have to be carefully fact-checked and re-edited; it's a shame that this was not done prior to publication.