An ambitious take on all things Arctic and mysterious
“Minds of Winter” by Ed O’Loughlin, House of Anansi, 480 pages, $22.95
When Sir John Franklin’s ship, the Erebus, was found in September of 2014, it brought an end to a mystery that began with its disappearance in 1846.
Erebus in Greek mythology was the personification of darkness and shadow. When it and its sister ship, Terror, went missing, a cloak of darkness, already a condition for half of the year in the Arctic, settled permanently on Franklin’s wife and the f amilies of his crew. (The Terror was located in 2016.) Lady Jane Franklin and the British government commissioned scores of search voyages, resulting in more deaths of sailors than the original 129 men on the expedition.
Franklin’s futile search for the Northwest Passage was the subject matter for novels, poems and songs for a century and a half. “Minds of Winter” continues that tradition, but in an ambitious, multilayered story.
The book opens with a news item about a Victorian carriage clock that appears to be a rebuilt chronometer that may have travelled with the Franklin ship. How did it survive the Arctic tragedy, where did it travel to, why was it rebuilt? The next chapter introduces two strangers driving on an ice-road across the Mackenzie delta in the Northwest Territories. Their story resumes 40 pages later: Fay has arrived from England on a flight to Inuvik, Nelson offers her a ride into town from the airport. He is in town looking for his estranged brother, Bert. Fay notices a picture of that carriage clock in a file about Bert, a possible link to her grandfather. Their efforts to uncover the two mysteries form the current-day portion of the book.
Alongside it are tales of polar exploration, Arctic and Antarctic; and the life story of an Inuit who helped in the early searches for Franklin’s ships and became ‘westernized’ by the Americans who adopted/adapted him and his f amily. Another plot links Fay’s grandfather Hugh to a military spy living in a luxury hotel in 1919 Victoria. Meares is a veteran of the Boer War, the Great War and many journeys of intrigue i n the Antarctic, Russia, and Japan and with Jack London in the Klondike. Later chapters pit Meares and Hugh in the shootout with Albert Johnson, the “Mad Trapper” of Rat River, and with postwar mapping of the high Arctic and building of the DEW line. Yet another section of the novel follows the life of Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer of both poles, and two of his lovers mourning his disappearance.
Did I mention how ambitious “Minds of Winter” is? O’Loughlin, the author, was born in Edmonton and grew up in Ireland. This is his third novel. While there were times that I questioned if he’d bitten off too much, I was hooked by the story-telling in each of these layers. Most of the stories have the flavour of Jack London, Boy’s Own or Hornblower serials. On the other hand, the Fay and Nelson seg- ments delve deeper into the meaning of life in the north; what Pierre Berton called “prisoners of the North.”
When, in the final chapter, Fay and Nelson watch the news of the Erebus discovery on a bar TV, the bartender says: “So that’s the end of that. HMS Erebus. They had to go and find her.
They had to solve a perfectly good mystery.” The search for Franklin literally mapped Canada’s northern islands. And what emerge as land masses were once indistinguishable from ocean under year-round polar ice. The mystery of a navigational timepiece symbolizes the ebb and flow of time in such a harsh landscape. I only wish that O’Loughlin had penetrated more the mystery of discovery — the arrogance of British admirals whose silver tea service was no match for the dark and bitter cold. And the arrogance of those who went in search of Franklin and ignored the non-linear knowledge of the Inuit, until only recently. I finished the book celebrating the author’s ambition.