Happiness writes white, it’s said: so too, one would think, does Antarctica. How is it possible to describe an environment which tolerates almost no life, which is derived from a single substance, and which is for the most part a single colour? Early explorers were simultaneously horrified and enthralled by the continent’s awesome singularity. Scott wrote of its ‘silent, wind-swept immensity’; Shackleton’s surgeon, Alexander Macklin, of its ‘same unbroken whiteness’.
Given Antarctica’s unsurpassed simplicity as a landform, one might expect writers to have shied away from it. And yet this fearsomely meaningless place has, especially in the 20th century, generated an enormous literature. For nearly 200 years, explorers, scientists and first-rank writers as various as Henry Thoreau and Thomas Pynchon have been attempting to come to terms with Antarctica through language.
Stephen Pyne’s magnificent book, The Ice, must be numbered among the finest of these attempts.
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