Saturday on the Couch: Under a Pole Star

Perhaps I should say, right from the start, having read Under A Pole Star by Stef Penney, I will now seek out and read The Tenderness Of Wolves, her earlier book. Ms Penney’s writing is excellent and her descriptive ability – especially relating to the harsh, barren wastes of the Arctic – is illuminating. It comes from someone who knows and respects the landscape about which she writes.

However, from another perspective, I have a few lingering reservations about her relationship with some of her characters.

The story starts in 1948. A modified Douglas C-47 Skytrain (a DC-3 in our understanding) has been polished up, given the celestial name Arcturus, and is about to take off on a flight from New Jersey to Gander, then on to the North Pole. A USAF aircrew prepares to depart with scientists from several American universities, an ABC camera crew and a young journalist. An old lady, “…white haired, erect and rather forbidding,” arrives and is introduced. She is 77-year-old  Flora Cochrane, a British woman known, fifty years earlier, as the Snow Queen, a fabled Arctic explorer.

Indeed for a female, especially a young girl, to be on a whaling boat in those times but her widowed father,  William Mackie, had no other option. He was skipper of the Dundee-built whaling steamer, Vega. Other men took their wives so why shouldn’t he, widowed, take his daughter?

The sturdy little ship was stranded in pack ice through that Winter of 1883/1884 and, in the many months away, Flora developed an enchantment for the frozen North; it was an attachment that would direct her education and lead to her return in 1889 as a young scientist/explorer. So determined had she become that, by 1892, she was back again, but this time as the head of an English expedition to northern Greenland.

Another expedition, American, and led by the driven Lester Armitage, also set out. Armitage believed there to be a land route to the North Pole and was intent on its discovery. Once discovered, he fully intended to claim it for his country. A member of his expedition was a young geologist from Brooklyn, Jakob de Beyn. Flora’s and Jakob’s paths crossed and the adventure became a truly epic love story, as much for the land to which they showed such great mutual attachment as for their personal association. Their relationship was ultimately shaped by tragic circumstances surrounding the Armitage expedition.

From the relationship, we learn much of Flora’s determination and drive. In fact, returning to the opening par, but perhaps fitting since the main character is a woman, the book’s prime male is shown in a lesser light.

There are some parts of the story that my dear old mother would have called ‘a bit juicy,’ and that certainly applies to the bedroom scenes. Flora, married but yet a virgin, took Jakob, a sexual opportunist, as her lover; in such circumstance, she was the stronger of the two, seeking perfection in bed as she did in her life’s work.

But the interest in Under A Pole Star extends far beyond their horizontal exertions, important though that aspect is to the story. It is more than simply gratuitous sex.

At the time of the flight in 1948, Flora is 77 years old. Her presence is due to her fame as a fabled Arctic explorer. Despite her initial reticence, Randall Crane, a reporter who accompanies the expedition, manages to get her talking. She begins to open up, with recollections extending back through the past including her expeditions, her marriage, her time at university, and all the way to that first trip into the Arctic on the whaling ship with her father.

Stef Penney has written a book that I consider portrays, at least in part, history and geography as it should ever be. She provides an entertaining look at both human endeavour and scientific achievement and the inevitable exploitation of the native Inuit. Her prose is a delight; I think it only fitting to end with an excerpt:

“…the water as still as a pond, the kayak drew a dark feather across the mercury-glass surface… the sun just visible through a veil of cloud, a nacreous disc of blurred light.”

Under A Pole Star by Stef Penney (published by Hachette Australia), deserves to do well. It is available now from Dymocks. Click here to learn more.