Francis Spufford explores the British obsession with polar exploration in a book that Jan Morris, writing in The Times, called, "A truly majestic work of scholarship, thought and literary imagination . . ." The title, a last quote from one explorer to his party as he left their tent never to return, embodies the danger and mystery that fueled the romantic allure of the poles and, subsequently, the British imagination. Far from being a conventional history of polar exploration, I May Be Some Time attempts to understand what was going on in the minds of the polar explorers as they headed toward destinies like Terra Nova. Serving up a heady brew of Captain Perry, Jane Eyre, gastronomic obsessions with iced desserts, and the daily lives of Eskimos, Spufford treats the reader to one of the most satisfying and imaginative contemporary works dealing with exploration and human need.
I'm a writer of non-fiction who is creeping up gradually on writing novels. I write slowly and I always move to new subject-matter with each book, because I want to be learning something fresh every time, both in terms of encountering history and people and thinking which are new to me, and also in the sense of trying out a new way of writing. My idea of a good project is one that I can only just manage. I've written a memoir of my childhood as a compulsive reader, an analysis of the British obsession with polar exploration, a book about engineers which is also a stealth history of Britain since 1945, and now "Red Plenty", about the moment in the early 1960s when it looked as if Soviet communism really might be beating the capitalist west in the race to abundance. But "Red Plenty" isn't exactly history, and it isn't exactly a novel either: it's a fusion of the two, to try to bring the world of the early-60s USSR alive. It's a comedy of ideas, and a sad story about the cost of ideas, all at once. I haven't finished my slow crabwise crawl into fiction yet; my next book, or maybe the one after next, will be a full-on freestanding novel with (I promise) no notes at the back of it at all. But this is where I've got to so far. I hope you enjoy it. The book has its own website at www.redplenty.com, where I've put out-takes, Soviet jokes, background material on the main characters, clips from Soviet music and film of the time - generally, things I used or enjoyed when I was doing the writing.
(Oh, biography. I was born in 1964, I'm married with a six-year-old daughter, and I teach on the MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, London.)
