Joanna Kavenna

Inflated dreams

issue 17 March 2012

When almost every tale about the Arctic has been told, when the major explorers have been assessed and re-assessed, when even the most obscure bit-players have been drawn into the light, what is a polar-minded author to do? Publishers can be such tiresome sticklers for novelty, always hankering after books to fire off into some perceived gap in the market. Failing that, they often insist on reputational piggy-backing — the author following in the footsteps of a legendary explorer, urgently intuiting the past, like a cross between a hiking holiday and a séance.

Alec Wilkinson ignores the fashionable justifications. His book does not blare out new revelations and he distinctly does not follow in the footsteps of his subject — quite sensibly, as his subject is Salomon August Andrée, the daring (or, some thought, delusional) Swede who tried to fly to the North Pole in 1897 in a hydrogen balloon.

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