How to Survive in the North by Luke Healy (review)

This graphic novel follows three plot strands: one about Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s 1913 Arctic expedition on the doomed ship Karluk; another about the 1921 expedition he planned that sent a crew to live on the desolate Wrangel Island in the Arctic; a third about Sully Barnaby, a contemporary professor at Dartmouth dealing with a forced sabbatical after his affair with a student is discovered. Each story involves people who are left behind: the icebound Karluk and its crew are left behind after Stefansson straps on skis and takes off; Ada Blackjack, the Inupiat seamstress on the 1921 expedition, is stranded on Wrangel Island when the rest of the group leaves to seek help; Sully discovers that his frat-boy love has moved on apace from what was clearly to him an insignificant dalliance. The Sully strand is the least satisfying, both because it never really grapples with Sully’s professorial malfeasance and because his loss is so minute compared with the other two. The two Arctic tales, however, are truly haunting: the hero of the first is stout-hearted Captain Bartlett, who rules the ship with an iron first and, with his Inuit compatriot Kataktovik, dog-sleds to an outpost of civilization to arrange a rescue ship after the Karluk sinks; of the second, Ada Blackjack carves out an existence that makes Island of the Blue Dolphins seem like a tropical cakewalk. The tidily drawn and surprisingly colorful panels don’t always make it easy to differentiate one parka-clad guy from another, so readers will need to be on their toes to remember that these are two different (if slightly overlapping) groups of Arctic explorers, but they’ll be affected by the tales nonetheless and hit up Wikipedia at the very least to get more of the story. The book concludes with a text section about the fate of the historical figures and an explanation of the author’s fictionalization of history.