I like a book where you don’t think you’re going to be interested in the subject, but then find it’s so vigorously and engagingly written that you’re enchanted. This is one of those. I’m not a skier —I’m quickly bored when coffee-drinking mothers start recounting their children’s latest achievements on the piste — so I expected to have had enough by page five, as I set off across the blinding whiteness of this ‘biography’ of snow, written by a man who’s wearing ski-goggles in the jacket photo.
But in Giles Whittell’s genial company, reading it was a great pleasure. An eloquent, witty writer, he bombards us with myth-busting facts, startling statistics and pleasingly incomprehensible geographical vocabulary, so it’s like enjoying a mélange of top daytime Radio 4 programmes: More or Less, Crossing Continents, Costing the Earth, Word of Mouth and Ramblings.
A true, deep enthusiast for snow, having fallen in love with the stuff as a boy reading Laura Ingalls Wilder describing pouring streams of molasses into it to make candy, Whittell is determined to convert us to his enthusiasm. Along with digressions into minor matters such as the fierce academic debate about whether the Inuit really do have hundreds of different words for snow (they probably have 53, is the current thinking, and Whittell singles out his favourite, utvak, which means ‘igloo snow’), he addresses the two central but opposing current phenomena: too much snow falling in some places, and not enough in others.
Don’t worry, though: the book is not a climate-change rant. It just so happens that ‘a once-great snow power, Europe is now managing a long-term decline’. Whittell dared to ask Raymond Pierrehumbert, Halley professor of physics at Oxford, when he thought the last great blizzard would happen, and he replied, alarmingly, ‘2040’.
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