Travel to Polar Regions

The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule

Format: Paperback
Author: Joanna Kavenna
ReleaseDate: 30 January, 2007
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Rating:

Mostly True North
She begins by visiting all the places that have been considered possible locations of Thule, the Shetland Islands, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, advancing northward, capturing what she sees as she smoothly explicates what other travelers have said about those places as Thule, and also examining the turbulent history of Arctic exploration at large. I'll admit I was resistant to this book at first - I guess I expected a more scholarly, weighty approach, rather than Kavenna's very personal picaresque - but she won me over quickly with her elegant, lyric prose, her disarming, understated persona, and her expert blending of travel narrative and history of ideas, literature and exploration.

To me, the strongest section of the book is when Kavenna grapples with the most hateful mannifestation of the Thule ideal - its expropriation by the Nazis as pristine mythico-historical homeland where snow white Aryan purity reigned. The Thule Society was one of many esoteric/political organizations that flourished in Europe, and one of the handful that served as an early focus and gathering place for what was to become the Nazi party. This confluence of modernist and fascist elements is as troubling as it is seemingly inevitable, and Kavenna approaches this treacherous territory with the proper measure of fascination and abhorrence.

Although Kavenna is very astute in her explication of the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun's big botch, his championing of the Germans, her brief precis of his work is the one place where I found The Ice Museum demonstrably off the mark:

"He became nostalgic and impatient; he lurched away from the city, writing nothing but rustic romances laced with sentimentality, tales of robust hunting men of few words, clumsy in elegant company, chasing the daughters of the local merchants through the vibrant forests. They lived in huts like mine, they wore big boots, they knew nothing of manners and conventions; they were tormented brutes, aware that society judged them. They were good a whittling wood, and occasionally sheer frustration at their failure to ensnare a local beauty led them to a melodramatic act. One of the rustic hut-dwellers shot himself in the foot one morning because the beautiful daughter of the local businessman wouldn't talk to him. "

It's hard to believe that Kavenna is old enough to have actually read the books and then forgotten so much about them. Anyone who has looked at Pan, the book she references, knows that it was in fact an early work and that its protagonist/narrator Lieutenant Glahn is no child of the land but, obviously an ex-army officer, which indicates social status, an extremely educated and articulate gentleman who chooses to live in a hut out of love of nature and a rejection of human society. And to say he shoots himself in the foot because Edvarda won't talk to him is criminal reductionism. Even August the old wandering protagonist of several of Hamsun's later works, although he does work odd jobs and pine over various beautiful daughters, is not an inarticulate brute, but an drop out from civilization, intent on living a life without ambition. There are a few books like Growth of the Soil which revolve around plain folk without the addition of a neurotic dreamer but they are very few, and Hamsun never loses the complexity of his vision.

I only wish she had at least glanced at Hamsun again before she wrote those words, but the "brute" idea fits so neatly with her arguments about the lure of fascism that she no doubt wanted it to be true. The other sad thing is that so few people are familiar with Hamsun that no editor called her on it before publication and so few people will know that it is utter bunk.

BUT otherwise I enjoyed the book. I worried as I neared the end because, like most picaresques, there's no natural ending that isn't an anti-climax. Unlike William Broad's The Oracle, Kavenna isn't going to "solve the mystery. " But she accomplishes closure elegantly, describing her visit to the island of Svalbard, a place nobody thought was Thule, but which is icy and cold enough to be truly Thulean. Here she finds scientists charting the climate changes which have already meant great changes to the arctic regions and may yet be the end of Thule, if not all of mankind.

Throughout Kavenna is able to give a provocative depth to her breezy travel narrative, and I highly recommend it as an entertaining, informative read - perfect for the coming winter. .

Interesting
Thule lies far to the north, on the edge of the Arctic ice, where the sun never set during midsummer. In the fourth century BC, the Greek merchant and explorer Pytheas (~380-~310 BC) traveled north through the North Sea, and finally ended up at a distant island, which he called Thule. Many centuries later, Joanna Kavenna, a native of London, found herself dreaming of an untouched northern landscape, glittering in its perpetual ice. And so, she set out to find Thule. . . this is the story of her search.

In this interesting book, the author does a good job of combining two different stories into one narrative. First and foremost, it is the story of Ms. Kavenna's visits to the northern lands that could have been Thule - the Shetland Islands, Norway, Iceland, Greenland and Svalbard. Secondly, this is the story of the idea of Thule, from Pytheas's history and its ancient detractors, through the Romantics, the Victorians and even the Nazis.

Overall, I found this to be quite an interesting book. The author is not an archaeologist, so you will not find any startling information on the ancient north. And she is also not an environmentalist, so while the tale of pollution of the north is described, it is far from being an important part of the book. Instead, what you have is the story of Thule, Thule as it was dreamed of in the past, and Thule as it exists today.

Any interested in true adventure will find her odyssey hard to put down
Kavenna's journey brought her in touch with others under the same spell, from past evidence of prior seekers to contemporaries. To the ancients Thule was considered a lost icy Eden of strange beauty, fueling the imagination of poets, explorers and now writer Joanna Kavenna, whose journey in search of the legendary Thule is documented in THE ICE MUSEUM: IN SEARCH OF THE LOST LAND OF THULE. Her journey also uncovered a host of frozen relics of the cold war - and it reads with all the 'you are there' drama of a diary and an investigative research piece. Any interested in true adventure will find her odyssey hard to put down.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
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