BOOK REVIEW:
The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic CircleBy Sara Wheeler, Jonathan Cape, £20
Sara Wheeler is the author of five previous books, including
Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica
, so she has form when it comes to the cold stuff. This is her account of a journey at the other side of the globe, around the Arctic, beginning in the easternmost reaches of Russia, taking the geographically short but culturally significant hop to Alaska and then travelling on through Canada, Greenland, Iceland and Scandinavia before returning to European Russia.
Given the nature of the geography – unrelenting sheets of snow and ice – you could be forgiven for thinking that this would be a somewhat narrow narrative. Wheeler, though, picks her way through the cultural topography with a keen eye for analysis and a sharp ear for a story, and she mines a rich seam of cultures that have survived on the least hospitable inhabited land on the planet.
There is an inescapable gravity to this book: this is the front line in climate change, after all, and many of the traditional societies Wheeler describes – all of them intricate cultures, balanced on a knife edge of survival – are on the cusp of irredeemable collapse or have already fallen off the cliff.
One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the sense that the final chapter in Arctic history is unfolding: as countries rush to claim swathes of seabed and government agencies struggle to remain conservative in their estimates of how much oil and gas could lie beneath, shipping companies are investigating the possibility of sailing across an Arctic Ocean seasonally free of ice, and environmentalists are despairing at the loss of an entire habitat. Wheeler’s beautiful language and riveting narrative add up to a powerful account of what is at stake and what has already been lost.