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QUOTES FROM REVIEWS OF ANTARCTIC NAVIGATION
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, January 1995
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Arthur won our heart with her last book, the warm and magical
memoir Looking For The Klondike Stone, but we are lost in
amazement over her new novel, a tale of yearning and discovery
as vast and crystalline as the continent it portrays. Arthur
submerged herself in researching Robert Scott's 1910 expedition
to the South Pole and spent wide-eyed time in Antarctica absorbing
the cut-glass beauty of the highest, coldest, and driest place
on earth. Arthur translates these intense experiences into
a spiritually rich and unfailingly dramatic story about a
woman of action named Morgan Lamont...Arthur treats us to
a remarkable blend of romance, high adventure, science and
philosophy, a heady mix not unlike Moby Dick in its depth,
passion, and revelation, but with a distinctly end-of-the-millenium
orientation. And Arthur's voice is all her own -- resplendent,
keen and full of wonder.
Donna Seaman, Booklist, November 25, 1994,
(boxed and starred)
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In a triumph of the novelists's art, Arthur brings a wide-ranging
intelligence and curiosity, a compelling skill in character
portrayal and a moral gravity to this 800-page story of human
quest. In chronicling the growing obsession of her heroine,
Morgan Lamont, to recreate the doomed 1910 Antarctic expedition
of Robert Falcon Scott, Arthur painstakingly develops Morgan's
complex character, credibly establishing her spiritual kinship
with the failed explorer and her determination to understand
the true meaning of his journey.
Publisher's Weekly, November 21, 1994, (boxed
and starred)
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Elizabeth Arthur's novel is so convincing that for several
chapters I was deluded into thinking that she was telling
her own story and that she had actually been to the Pole...This
is a very good novel indeed, if it is a novel. One almost
feels that the author wrote it under the influence of Scott,
that she so breathed in the necessary geographical, scientific
emotional and spiritual aspects of that dreadful journey to
transcend fiction, and spin reality.
Beryl Bainbridge, Newsday, January 8, 1995
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A keenly imagined novel of a woman-led expedition to Antarctica
that sets out to vindicate both the human spirit and Robert
Scott, the famous polar failure..[Her]Prose is both lyrical
and perceptive about nature, heroism, and the splendid power
of books to catch the imagination.
Kirkus Reviews
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[A] vast and wonderful novel...Antarctic Navigation is modeled
after the great Victorian novels, rich in subplots and recurring
themes, as deep and resonant as it is long...The next best
thing to being in such a ferocious icescape, this is a beautifully
written book that invites us into the world's 'highest, driest,coldest
place'-- and one very unusual woman's mind.
Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever, in
Outside, January 1995
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Antarctic Navigation is a magnificent and enthralling novel,
a real 'whale chaser', and Melville, I think, would be proud
of the comparison. Morgan Lamont is surely the strongest,
most intelligent, and most passionate protagonist I've encountered
in quite a while, and her story does what literature is suppose
to do: sweep us away, hold us spellbound, and finally transform
us.
Ron Hansen, author of Mariette in Ecstasy
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Fully imagined, rich with character and incident, Antarctic
Navigation takes the reader on an unforgettable voyage of
the mind and heart and body, Each sentence has been carefully
tended, each scene carefully wrought, and the result is a
work of of luminous and lasting beauty.
Tim O'Brien, author of Going After Cacciatio
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Antarctic Navigation is a big, glorious, riveting adventure,
with one of the most winning heroines in contemporary fiction.
Hilma Wolitzer
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This huge novel is filed with riches: the portrayal of Morgan's
early years in Colorado, for instance, is so vividly imagined
that it captures the true otherworldliness of childhood. The
complex background of Morgan's Antarctic trek... is laid out
with a sense of scope and ambition rarely seen in contemporary
writing., These qualities alone make this novel compelling
reading, but it is the way the enormous whole is informed
with the knowledge of a life -- Arthur's unabashed attempt
to shape all that she knows into a book others can share --
that makes her achievement truly astonishing. I was, quite
literally, thrilled to be reading it.
James Mustich, A Common Reader, January
1995
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Thoroughly engrossing...With [Arthur's] seamless prose and
her unerring sense of time and place, she brings alive her
settings as few writers today can.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
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At its most basic level, Antarctic Navigation is a gripping
adventure story. But it's far more than this. It's a love
story. It's a physical and spiritual quest. It's a meditation
on the future of our planet both in environmental and moral
terms. It's an essay on imperialism and the way we are still,
one way or another, deeply involved with exploitation. It's
the story of one individual's groping toward wisdom...Arthur
writes so beautifully, with such leisurely clarity, that the
book is always a joy.
The Boston Book Review
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All the ingredients a reader could hope for: parallel historical
and contemporary dramas, a contest between personal aspirations
and the powers of nature, the testing of human relationships
under extreme conditions, and a magnificent setting.
The Boston Globe
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As Elizabeth Arthur convinces us in her meticulously researched,
powerfully drawn, and deeply felt novel, there are many beginnings
and endings sealed within the polar ice... Antarctic Navigation
is more than an adventure story recast in contemporary feminist
terms. It is also a bumpy coming-of-age tale: an exploration
of the unmapped terrain of the hear; a flirtation with the
complexities of ecopolitics, pacifism, and New Age mysticism;
a dip into history, memoir and science, and Arthur's passionate
love letter to the natural world...We read Arthur's book the
same way she says we should make our way across the earth,
treading lightly, and leaving behind little scuff marks of
pleasure.
Margaria Fichtner, Miami Herald, January
15, 1995
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Morgan is a true adventurer, one who feels that our imperiled
environment will soon be at the point of no return, with its
rescue dependent on lessons we might learn from the pristine
vastness of the earth's last unspoiled wilderness. To this
end, her desire is to someday re-create Scott's Terra Nova
expedition...Yet within a novel whose heft has the weight
of an epic, and whose landscape is, to most of us, as remote
as the surface of the moon, Arthur creates a diverse cast
of characters whose courage and conviction seem up to the
task.
Paul Pintarich, The Sunday Oregonian, April
2, 1995
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Beautifully written...Arthur writes with such clarity and
affection for her characters that they engage the reader...Every
page is filled with wonderful character descriptions, visual
images, and just plain good writing.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
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The bleak and beautiful landscape of Antarctica provides
the backdrop for this epic novel of adventure and self-discovery...In
its whiteness and purity, its unforgiving nature, its status
as the last unconquered place, Arthur finds metaphors to discuss
colonialism, feminism, environmental planning, war, history,
and science... Antarctic Navigation is a stunning novel that
works on many levels...[and] tackles some of the most complex
issues of our time.
Jean Blish Siers, Chicago Tribune
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Reading Elizabeth Arthur's new book is like talking to a
friend you haven't seen in years... A classic heroic quest...the
book is extraordinarily satisfying. Morgan's interior quest
and her reflections on the meaning of Antarctica are absolutely
fresh and engrossing. Reading the book becomes a kind of quest
itself, after which the world will never again look the same.
Roz Spafford, San Francisco Chronicle, January
15, 1995
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Readers will come away with a sense of having been given
a glittering gift: an appreciation and respect for an awesome,
awful place, the likes of which most of us will never see.
Except, perhaps, in a dream.
The Virginian Pilot and the Ledger-Star
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Remarkable...[An] absorbing telling of an extraordinary woman
exploring the extraordinary land.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
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If indeed Antarctica proves to be our milleniums's last great
tabula rasa, our austral Eden, then Arthur may prove to be
its Boswell... Morgan is a rare and marvelous character in
contemporary literature, a woman driven by a wildly heroic
obsession... Barring a trip to the continent itself, there
may be no better way to experience the perilous and endangered
majesty of Antarctica, and those who are driven not to conquer,
but to understand and preserve it.
Elizabeth Hand, Detroit Metro Times Literary
Quarterly, Vol 2 No. 1, Spring 1995
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| A major
American work - a work of astonishing power, range, and vision.
The dazzling landscape central to
this multifaceted tale of adventure and aspiration is the white
Antarctic vastness known as the Ice. The story is told of an expedition
to the South Pole, led by a young, ardent American woman, Morgan
Lamont - an expedition inspired and haunted by the tragic journey,
eighty years before, of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott.
For Morgan, Scott’s life, his
dream, his death, and the very concept of Antarctic navigation are
obsessive emblems of the search for integrity in a morally precarious
age. Freed by her mother’s quixotic and frightening sacrifice
and the generosity of her hitherto estranged grandfather, she sets
out to fulfill her dream - to “vindicate” Scott by recreating
his historic polar expedition.
Morgan’s journey - and everything
in her life, and in her America, that has led to it - is made vivid
and real. This is how Morgan the daughter, the lover, the independent
thinker, the maverick, becomes the Morgan who brings together a
brilliant, unlikely group of explorers and rallies them through
physical and emotional dangers, crises and storms, across the ice
to the Pole.
As she and her companions head back
to their base, built near the hut from which Scott’s expedition
set out; as they struggle to cross once more, before the austral
winter begins, the magnificent and terrible terrain that is the
last great wilderness on earth; as Morgan’s own physical, intellectual
and emotional certainties are severely tested, we see in her a hero
for our times. Her epic journey of the heart and mind and body becomes
emblematic of the dangerous passage all of us face as the millenium
approaches.
At once extravagant and austere,
pulsing with color and detail against the start Antarctic ice, this
is a novel as singular as the continent it reveals. It is a work
whose authenticity, storytelling force and metaphorical richness
- immersing us in the world of Antarctic exploration - illumine
both the meaning of the century now ending and the power of the
human spirit to navigate the new and the unknown.
Book excerpt will be available
when e-version of Antarctic Navigation is online at Hollow Tree
Press.
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