Travel beyond end of world
A bright, shining gem of a book illuminates a far off time and place for Nicola McCloy.
Any historian will tell you that time spent fossicking in dusty archives or meandering around online resources throws up little gems of inspiration as often as it does the sought-after information. Reading To the Bright
Edge of the World, it’s not hard to imagine Eowyn Ivey spending countless hours wandering through the historic resources that her home state of Alaska has to offer.
What makes Ivey’s depth of digging so clear is that this is an historical novel entirely made up of letters, diary entries, photographs, newspaper cuttings and other bits of archival ephemera. So clever is the construction of To the Bright Edge of
the World that it’s hard to imagine that these places and people only exist in Ivey’s imagination and not in the tough world that is Alaska’s back country.
In it, explorer and army colonel Allen Forrester recounts tales from beyond the edge of the known world, full of mysterious creatures, unknowable people and brutal landscapes. Meanwhile, his wife Sophie is challenging frontiers and railing against the boundaries of life as a Victorian woman. As ‘‘big’’ as Forrester’s world is, his wife’s is equally fascinating and their interwoven tales come together in a surprisingly tender love story.
While Ivey’s human characters are fascinating and beautifully drawn, by far the biggest character in this, her second novel, is Alaska itself. With her words, she draws the state’s vast landscape and changing light deftly and effortlessly. The clarity with which she describes the wilderness of the then newly acquired and uncharted territory is at times breathtaking. Through Forrester’s eyes we are introduced to a land that is both dangerous and beautiful in equal part, and that can change in an instant.
Another real strength of this book is the way that it depicts the lives of the native Alaskan people – through Forrester’s diaries, Ivey tells a story quite different from that which the colonel recounts in his army reports. The merging of myth and legend with a Eurocentric view of the world is handled sensitively and smartly.
The tension between the two worlds is perhaps best summed up in a letter written by a modern-day curator reviewing the colonel’s papers: ‘‘It’s a paradox, though. Where can we go to learn about Alaska’s people, how they lived and worshipped and dressed before living memory? The explorers are witnesses to the before. The Colonel’s diaries, like the writings of Meriwether Lewis and Captain Cook, are a kind of cursed treasure.’’
While these men’s diaries may be a kind of cursed treasure, To the Bright
Edge of the World is far from cursed. It is a bright, shining gem of a book that is a real testament to Ivey’s skill as both writer and researcher.