True North: Travels in Arctic Europe, by Gavin Francis
This is an old-fashioned travel book of the linear variety. Roaming the northern fringes of Europe with a tent and a nose for a story, Scottish doctor Gavin Francis looks beyond the icebergs and the stunted willow seeking ‘a back country of the imagination where myth and reality intertwined’. Beginning at Unst, the northernmost of the Shetlands, Francis sets out to ‘follow a route that Europeans had taken towards what they once saw as the very limits of the world’. Heading by ferry to the Faroes, he continues to Iceland, Greenland, the snowy hinterland of Scandinavian Finnmark, and finally Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago that includes Spitzbergen.
The format is simple: a well-whipped blend of history and travelogue. For his central theme, Francis homes in on the role northernmost Europe has played as the focus for human voyages and dreams, and as such, True North is a journey through time as much as space.
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