The Terror (2007)

In 1845 two 3-masted sailing ships of the Royal Navy, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, embarked on a journey under the command of Sir John Franklin to find the Northwest Passage, the perhaps non-existent path connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans across the impenetrable ice of the Antarctica. Manned by veterans of many polar expeditions, they were equipped with steam engines, central heating systems, reinforced hulls designed to withstand the assaults of ice, a state-of-the-art medical laboratory, and enough food supplies stocked to last for 5 years.  They sailed past Greenland, and then, despite the multiple rescue expeditions sent after them in the coming years, were never been heard from again. 

Dan Simmons's fictional account of the expedition starts in 1847. The Erebus and Terror have been frozen in the ice and permanent darkness for a year now. The coal reserves are almost depleted. The temperature is around freezing point under the decks and tens of degrees lower outside. The leader of the expedition is dead. The doctors start to suspect that the canned food that was supposed to sustain the crew for many years is contaminated and slowly poisoning them instead. And the cold, the dark, and scurvy are not the most imminent danger out there. There is something on the ice, something almost invisible but ferocious, something possessing malevolent intelligence, that picks the men one by one leaving only screams and torn bodies behind.

Simmons's story unfolds with the momentum and immensity of a glacier. As the supernatural force stalks the men, the indifferent forces of nature are slowly but unstoppably crushing them, as the ice slowly crushes the ships that serve as their cold shelters.

As the explorers run out of options, hopes, and warm bodies by the day, the reader is treated with an incredibly detailed description of the life of arctic seamen. Every level of hierarchy, rank, and role from cook to commander is explored. So are the ships from the upper deck to the lowest holds, from the officer's quarters to the layers of wood and steel that form the broken hull. Through the ships' Ice Masters' words, Simmons tells about the different forms of ice floating in the Arctic waters, through the numerous and failed excursions the versatility of the bleak surface surrounding the ships hundreds or thousands of miles in every direction. Using the eyes and voices of different characters, the author unpicks every minutiae of life on the ships. From the layers of clothing the men used to try and fail to keep their bodies warm with, through the types of food their ships were stacked with, to the kinds and builds of rescue boats they dragged on the ice in their desperate attempts to reach open waters, and myriad other facts.

The details and quality of the description of the expedition are matched by the portrayal of the inner lives of the characters, which through their memories lets the reader glimpse into the lives of different strata of British society. Into an era of suffocating societal rules, bigotry, arrogance, and casual cruelty toward lower classes. The last of which, in the form of condescension toward the indigenous people of the North, specifically the disregard for their expertise for survival, cost every single life of the expedition.

Simmons does all this with the confidence of a superb writer who can immerse his readers in the sea of information without drowning them. And unlike Erebus and Terror, he never loses steam throughout his mammoth of a novel. To call "The Terror" long is a British understatement. Perhaps the greatest testament of the book I can pay is that it kept me captivated all the way to the very last of its 920 (!) pages.