Wayne Johnston: The Navigator of New York

Reviewed by RAE McGREGOR*

Is Newfoundland to become the new Tuscany? Will there be more books coming to us with a background of the sea, the ice, and the hard terrain?

Annie Proulx did it with The Shipping News and Wayne Johnston has already written two books with Newfoundland as the background. This latest is set in Newfoundland and New York.

It is a historical novel, woven around the exploring voyages of Commander Robert Peary and Frederick Cook, two opposing figures who were intent on being the first to discover the North Pole.

Controversy remains over whether it was Cook or Peary who reached the Pole first, and there is still doubt about whether either ever arrived at their elusive goal.

Johnston has said he spent a year on research for the novel. It shows. We have great detail of New York in 1900. Detail on the clothes people wore. Long descriptions of the bridges in New York and the overhead train system. Details on supplies, and how the sledges were constructed for the treks.

Where Johnston really excels, though, is when he allows himself the range of description of the ice. From Signal Hill at St Johns, the young narrator Devlin Stead sees for the first time the awe-inspiring sight of the spring transit of ice past the headland.

"From the scree of ice, a berg so large its underside must have been ploughing the seabed ahead of it like snow, reared up, vast, incongruous. This was not winter as I knew it but some absolute of winter. The snow of which this ice was made had not fallen from the sky but was ancient and prevailed like stone. It was as though all of Greenland had broken up."

Later, an account of an iceberg calving is so well-written that the breaking, groaning, urging ice seems real.

Peary and Cook are well-drawn characters. Their fanaticism and urge to conquer the northern sea ice underpin the story and give it strength.

Johnston has taken advantage of the leeway provided by the novel format to depict the psychology of his characters, the state of mind the travellers experienced when they were alone on vast expanses of ice, with more insight than one would ever find in a biography.

We gain great insight into their fears: not always sure where they were and whether they would ever return to their homes, the men were hungry, frightened, hallucinating, and always trying to defeat the cold.

Of less interest is the fictional life of Devlin Stead. In a peculiar twist there is a kinship between Stead and Cook, and an ensuing friendship and loyalty from Stead, but he remains a one-dimensional character.

While Peary and Cook leap from the book as fully grown people, Stead stumbles through the story a mere cardboard cut-out. The other fictional characters surrounding Stead never become fully blown, either.

But take nothing away from Johnston when he writes about the ice. The snow, the cold, the isolation, seep into your bones. You will need to put on woolly gloves and turn up the electric blanket when you read these chapters.

Jonathan Cape $34.95

* Rae McGregor is an Auckland writer.