Travel: Living in a flat overlooking London's gridlocked Westway, in a job that failed to hold her attention, hankering for the freedom of a Suffolk childhood, Joanna Kavenna sets off for Thule, the ultimate stop on the road to the north.
Many have gone before her, searching for this frozen Atlantis, and some returned certain they had found it - in Iceland, Greenland, Norway, in the land of the reindeer-herding Sámi. Some thought Thule was a state of mind, a harking back to a long-lost purity. Others believed it was a way forward on the road to regaining that purity. One man thought it was a hole in the ground. Pytheas reached it in 400 BC after the people of the north took him to the point where the sun disappeared. Nansen said this was Norway, Strabo said it was impossible, and Columbus said it was Iceland.
In Lerwick, there is a bar called the Thule and in Greenland, courtesy of the Danish government, a NATO listening-post called Thule. And, courtesy of the United States Air Force, the indigenous Inuit were relocated to an invented village called Thule.
Kavenna travels by plane, ice-breaker, helicopter and hired car; overnights in tents and hotels, sleeps on deck or by the glowing embers of a camp fire but, like the Hamlet cigar, is rarely alone, for there is no longer something called wilderness, however much that section of the travel industry would like us to think so. Travelling myself once, 200 miles up into the Arctic Circle and sensing the solitary silence of the tundra, I voiced my fear that we might be lost. My Finnish companion smiled and said gently: "This is not unknown territory."
Kavenna travels the best way - as an outsider - politely asking awkward questions, drinking her Aquavit slowly and networking furiously. She meets the man with the hole theory. It was a meteorite that landed on the Estonian island of Saaremaa, he tells her. News of the event was handed down until it became a story of the sun falling from the sky, the last sunset.
In Germany, there was a bunch of dangerous fanatics who established the Thule Society in 1918. In Munich's Four Seasons Hotel - where the society used to congregate - Kavenna meets a woman who explains that "they took this idea of a last land in the north and made it the cradle of German history". Later, in Kirkenes, close to Norway's North Cape, she meets a woman who is a product of that nightmare, for when invading German soldiers impregnated Norwegian women, the offspring were to be brought up and treasured as pure Aryans until, of course, Norway regained its freedom and such children were treated as unsavoury.
Kavenna, the recipient of a fellowship at St Anthony's College, Oxford (the blurb carries an endorsement by Avi Shlaim, also of St Anthony's), has written a book that not only examines the centuries-old yearning for the dream that is Ultima Thule but also evokes the reality of the Arctic. Her awe for its magnitude shines as bright as the sunlit icebergs that scrape the sides of the ship when, like any sailor in moments of madness, she turns to the metaphysical.
Handing her map to an old Norwegian deckhand, she asks him where they are. "Vi er her," he says, pointing to a spot on the map. "We are here in the continuously shifting 'here' of the voyage north." writes Kavenna. When she gets excited, she repeats herself. Church bells are often atonal; the sun, understandably, spends a lot of time going down.
Kavenna is in love - though she doesn't know it - with Nansen, the great Norwegian explorer, slipping in references to him at every opportunity, like a woman savouring the name of her illicit lover.
And why not? Nansen, long dead, was one of the greats. His theory of Arctic drift - whereby his boat, the Fram, should have taken him to within reach of the North Pole - let him down. Instead, he loaned the Fram to Roald Amundsen, who then sailed it to reach the South Pole.
Mary Russell is a travel writer who has spent times with the Sámi reindeer herders in the Arctic Circle
The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule By Joanna Kavenna Viking, 352pp. £16.99