Customer Reviews

I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination

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Fascinating exploration of how the romantic movement nurtured the creation of an ideal vision of arctic/antarctic ice that ultimately contributed to a sense that it was nobler to suffer than survive. I found the book a well-written survey of popular opinion and response to polar exploration in England that presents an interesting thought: the idea that the ultimate source of Scott's disaster in the Antarctic may not have been stupidity, ego, arrogance, or any of the character flaws with which Robert F. Scott has been charged so much as hopeless romanticism (a character flaw all its own, true enough, which may contain elements of All Of The Above).

I May Be Some Time is a wonderful--and moving--book. Readers who were disappointed in it may have been looking for an adventure story. Well, it is that at the end, but the end comes as the climax of a long, complex, and fascinating cultural history. Readers interested in English culture in the 19th century--the world that gave rise to much Arctic and Antarctic exploration--will find this book compelling. Spufford examines imaginative literature of the period, the impact of new developments in the sciences, changing ideas of history and culture, British pride in the empire, and the roles expected of and actually played out by men and women whose lives involved them in exploration. He concludes his study with a profoundly moving narrative account of Scott's doomed final journey. This is a book that requires patience and attention on the part of the reader, but it is also a book that offers real rewards.

If you have come this far into the Antarctic you've already read Lansing,
Mawson, Scott, Shack, Cherry-Garrard, and Lashly. So those trudging first person narratives that caught your attention have given over to the Huntford style management critic, you got that. And here with Spufford you arrive at the analytical pole. This is not a discussion of technique nor tactics but from the South Center you can look in all directions at religion, music, poetry, myth, media; and the very power of precedence to both push and pull men.
Here is the geography that makes otherwise hard practical men simply and ultimately spiritual; the deserts frozen or not, hold horizons of nothing that fill mens' heads with everything.
Beyond this is to dream and hallucinate; try a little
Vollmann. Enjoy the ride.

PS. The last chapter of this book is worth its price; 48 pages of the best in the language on Scott and his men.
It will make you cry.

If you are looking for a possible answer as to why Scott and Shackleton risked their lives to get to the South Pole, this is NOT the book. Written in the style of a very dry doctoral dissertation, I May Be Some Time clouds some interesting ideas with turgid prose, tortured sentence structure, and an air of academic snobbery.

Francis Spufford's "I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination" seeks to show the relationship between polar exploration and English literature. He asks why British polar explorers willingly placed their lives in jeopardy in the harsh polar environment; was it gold or glory or something else? The answer, Spufford believes, rests not with the explorers themselves but with the English imagination as expressed in the writings of such the Brontės, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, and others.

At a sublime level this book is about the power of ideas to shape imperial ambitions. Romance about the Arctic distorted perceptions both of reality in England and in the far-off lands of the North. The concept of the sublime in the works of Edmund Burke and Samuel Coleridge found themselves deployed to explain the inspiration and terror of the Arctic ice and the environment of the cold. Arctic explorers transmogrified the sublime into a nostalgic identification of the Poles with the best of the human imagination. Conquest of the Arctic in Spufford's estimation might be equated with virtue and destiny. It propelled the British Empire into an unending quest for knowledge about the Polar region.

Spufford's argument is quite useful, but it tends to downplay what I view as the critical component of English exploration of the Arctic, the quite mundane and practical desire to find a water route around the Americas to foster trade with Asia. The search for the Northwest Passage had motivated English Arctic expeditions since the sixteenth century and while imagination certainly aided in sustaining those efforts in the face of failure, there was a clearly understood and delineated rationale for undertaking them that had little to do with the sublime and philosophies. A fascinating account nonetheless, that requires serious consideration by anyone seriously interested in the history of Arctic exploration.

Relentlessly prolix, unbearably sententious, I found reading this book like climbing out a snowdrift - hard work! There are whole pages without a paragraph and my skipping techniques were tested to the utmost. What a pity - the history of polar exploration is a fascinating subject that deserves better treatment: perhaps Mr Spufford is trying too hard. Within the heaps of slush there are a few nuggets of, if not gold, then silver plate, but most are contained in the last chapter, which takes some getting to! All told, a classic Don't Buy.