Books: Tale leaves trail of unanswered questions

Is it a good book that leaves you wanting to know more?

Well, sure, if your curiosity has been fired off in new directions. But then again, no, not when you're having to fill in some fairly grievous knowledge gaps.

What we have here is an updated version of the book that blew the lid off what really happened to Sir James Franklin and his 128 fellow voyagers in 1845 after they sailed into the frozen Arctic wastes in search of a shortcut to the Pacific and disappeared.

Much of the tale concerns the rediscovery and subsequent exhumation of three expedition members who had the good fortune to die early. The point being to prove once and for all that they'd been handed a death sentence before even leaving port. The killer? The humble tin can. Okay, the humble tin can and greed, a combination that conspired to offer every one of those men, along with one dog and a monkey, grim and lonely endings. And if that wasn't bad enough, rather than resting in peace, the dead were chopped up and eaten.

Now, it shouldn't be a spoiler for anyone who's paid any attention to the sagas of the Northwest Passage that sailors on such expeditions died in their droves. Nothing new there, a high death toll among voyaging crewmen had been as standard as the odd storm and sunburn, except that the typical reaper was scurvy.

It was the Admiralty's attempts at remedial action that saw the introduction of lime juice (hence limeys for Englishmen) and eventually, in what they thought would fix the problem forever, canned food. It turns out they'd simply swapped one nasty for something even nastier: lead poisoning.

And so we meet our villain, Stephan Goldner, a canny Hungarian immigrant with an eye for a business opening. Actually no, we don't meet him at all and it's a major failing that I needed Google to find out anything about him and his canning business. Instead, having pulled us in with the madness of Britain's icy obsession and the fates to HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, the narrative gets bogged down by the banal details of CSI:Arctic.

I still have questions. What attracted sailors to join these missions in the first place? What did they do during the freezing months their ships were trapped in ice? Just how crazy does lead poisoning drive you? What would it have been like to wear the frozen shoes of those starving, maddened cannibals? And what the hell did the Inuit think about these silly buggers showing up to fruitlessly faff about in their waterways?

There's plenty of (dodgy) meat in this story, but I'm thinking Messrs Beattie and Geiger might want to take a third run at it.

Frozen In Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition
by Owen Beattie & John Geiger
(Greystone $27.99)

• Alan Perrott is a Canvas writer.