Vol. 27 No. 17 · 1 September 2005
pages 29-30 | 2593 words
Yearning for Polar Seas
James Hamilton-Paterson
- The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule by Joanna Kavenna
Viking, 334 pp, £16.99, February 2005, ISBN 0 670 91395 2
- The Idea of North by Peter Davidson
Reaktion, 271 pp, £16.95, January 2005, ISBN 1 86189 230 6
My father was born in China and no doubt I caught from him his own boyhood tingle at the idea of ships and their Empire routes, especially long ocean voyages by P&O liner. Excitement, homesickness, the magic of the word ‘Orient’: to a child growing up in South-East England in the 1940s and 1950s, such elements blended early into a near-poetry of longing for a vertical sun. By the time I was ten I had devoured shelves of adventure books set in the mysterious East. They were full of the clichés of the Raj: flying fish, lascar seamen, coolies, amahs, syces, green-eyed idols and fiendish poisons leached from tropical plants unknown to European science. At 11 I embarked on my first love affair, falling hopelessly for Kim. Never have I yearned so much to inhabit someone else’s skin as I did Kim’s. Even now, past sixty, I can catch him flitting through some dappled interior and feel again an urge to be up and lurking in hot bazaars, fluent in many languages, chewing betel nut with street vendors and taking tea with governors. At some moment in my first decade my inner compass was irretrievably set. Like Auden, who was never not thinking of Iceland, I have never not faced the Orient.
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Letters
Vol. 27 No. 19 · 6 October 2005
From Peter Davidson & Joanna Kavenna
We were grateful to James Hamilton-Paterson for his generous discussion of our books (LRB, 1 September). However, we were startled by his suggestion that The Ice Museum and The Idea of North could most usefully be discussed through comparison with Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. The books are about very different landscapes and themes. Lopez writes about the history and wildlife of the Arctic. He is concerned in particular with the region from Bering Strait in the west to Davis Strait in the east, an area stretching across Alaska and Canada. The Idea of North tries to write about the imaginative responses of the art and literature of Europe, Japan and China, from the distant past to the present, to the concept of ‘North’. The ‘North’ of the book is therefore geographically wide-ranging: in some contexts, Milan is a ‘North’. It is stated explicitly in the opening pages that it is not a book about the Arctic. The Ice Museum aims to discuss the uses of the classical myth of Thule in northern European writing, political movements and cartography. The book is about Britain, the Baltic States, Germany, Iceland and Norway; Canada and Alaska are not among its concerns. Neither book aims at a Lopez-style account of the Arctic. Equally, Arctic Dreams does not offer an account of the myth of Thule or the idea of ‘North’. Hamilton-Paterson explains that he does not really care for the North and much prefers the Far East: an Eastern analogy might be comparing books about the myth of Shangri-La or the idea of ‘East’ to a history of the physical geography of Japan.
Peter Davidson & Joanna Kavenna
Aberdeen & Oxford
Vol. 27 No. 20 · 20 October 2005
From Roger House
James Hamilton-Paterson calls the Arctic Circle ‘an imaginary boundary arbitrarily drawn’ (LRB, 1 September). Imaginary it might be – there is no line drawn on the ground – but arbitrary it is not. The Arctic Circle is at latitude 66.5º (approximately), which is 90º (the location of the North Pole) minus 23.5º, the tilt of the Earth’s axis with respect to the plane of the Earth’s orbit. More exactly, in 2000, the latitude for the Arctic Circle was 66º33’39”. The tilt of the Earth varies with time, so the Arctic Circle is not at a fixed latitude. Some very real phenomena occur above the Arctic Circle and not below it. For example, above the Arctic Circle, the sun is above the horizon for at least 24 continuous hours once a year (the midnight sun).
Roger House
Sebastopol, California
From J.M.W. Scott
James Hamilton-Paterson’s review of two books on the North mentions the icebergs outside the harbour in St John’s, and notes that the destruction of the cod stocks on the Grand Banks has had a bad effect on the Newfoundland economy. However, St John’s is a full degree south of Paris, while the UK, which is located north of latitude 50º, is not normally taken to be part of the North. The icebergs outside St John’s harbour in springtime are a consequence of the north-south Labrador Current, which has the opposite effect on the Newfoundland climate to that produced by the south-north Gulf Stream on the UK.
J.M.W. Scott
St John’s, Newfoundland
