One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Clare Dudman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 22, 2005

In this unforgettable debut novel Clare Dudman has imaginatively re-created the life of the German scientist Alfred Wegener, whose theory of continental drift—derided by his contemporaries—would eventually revolutionize our perception of the world. Wegener’s irresistible urge to discover the unknown takes him from the horrors of World War I’s trenches to several lengthy expeditions across the unexplored ice of Greenland, an extraordinary quest that—with the support of a remarkable woman—gives birth to a powerful idea worth fighting for. Distinguished by its evocation of the unforgiving beauty of the Arctic, this stunningly written tale of obsession and courage will thrill readers of scientific history and the best adventure writing.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In British author Dudman's stunning first adult novel, she reveals the poetry of science, interweaving a deep character study of German meteorologist Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) with scenes of pulse-pounding Arctic adventure. Today, Wegener's theory of continental drift, with some refinements, is accepted as scientific truth. During his time, however, Wegener was seen as an eccentric failure. Dudman allows Wegener to tell his own story in first-person present tense. This approach utterly immerses the reader in a sensual, detail-rich world. Dudman's prose is luminous, as in Wegener's reverie over the pages of a rare old book: "I too am adding parts of myself to the pages: oils are leaking from the skin of my hands and molecules of fat are smearing themselves invisibly on its surface." Dudman also displays an astute gift for characterization. Wegener's complex relationship with his brother Kurt and his love for his wife, Else, as measured against his lust for meteorological expeditions, is expertly, often heartbreakingly portrayed. As the story leads inexorably toward Wegener's demise in the frozen tundra of Greenland, Dudman's control over her material becomes even more masterful. The emotional yet understated final scenes are particularly fine. Above all, Dudman shows us one incontrovertible truth about her Wegener: he loved the world, in all of its riotous complexity. Some may say the same of Dudman after reading this wise, beautiful novel.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

In 1930, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener disappeared on an expedition to Greenland; six months later, his body was found, perfectly preserved, beneath the ice. Dudman takes this as the starting point of her novel, a fictional autobiography in which Wegener embodies the scientist as man of action, launching hydrogen-balloon flights, spelunking down frozen crevasses, and racing across glaciers as the ice cracks. Between exploits, he investigates the origins of rain and the craters of the moon, and fends off attacks on his theory of continental drift—dismissed at the time as far-fetched but now widely accepted. As a narrator, Wegener is firmly rooted in his time, almost to a fault; occasionally, one wishes that the prose were less restrained and that the author had given her subject's life more of an arc. Still, Dudman artfully channels Wegener's voice—prim and fastidious, but filled with longing—so convincingly that her book reads like an artifact of Old World exploration.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• ISBN-10: 0143034731
• ASIN: B000HWYP0C
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,782,448 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Clare Dudman has a PhD in chemistry and has worked as a research scientist and as a teacher in high schools and universities - both in science and creative writing. Her writing has won two national awards and she has won a prize for a short story. She has also been awarded two grants for travel and has wandered around remote parts of Greenland, Patagonia and China on her own, but some of her favourite travelling was inside her head when she trained to be shaman for a character in her latest book. As well as exotic settings she is interested in scientific ideas and enjoys incorporating these in her fiction - set either in the past or some other world of her own invention. She has been married for decades, has two adult sons and lives with her husband close to the town in north Wales where she was born.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Equal parts science and poetry, August 27, 2006

By 

Debra Hamel (North Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead (Paperback)

Clare Dudman's first novel for adults (she published a children's book in 1995) takes the form of a series of vignettes strung bead-like from the memory of her subject, German scientist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930). If Wegener's name isn't familiar to you it's because you don't have a geologist in your life: he is the father of modern plate tectonics. Though recognized today for his contributions, Wegener was derided during his lifetime for his theory of Continental Drift--that the earth's continents are not static but are constantly moving, and that their movement over billions of years can explain various geological and biological phenomena.

Channeling Wegener's voice, Dudman tells his story from childhood, through his days as a student, to adulthood, a full scientific and personal life that included the deaths of siblings, military service, marriage and children, repeated expeditions to the frozen reaches of Greenland, and ridicule at the hands of his scientific peers. Occasionally the older Wegener, the man telling the story, interjects to remark on his youthful pomposity, say, or to hint at future events. But for the most part one is allowed to lose oneself in the reading, which very often means finding yourself alongside Wegener on the Greenlandic ice, behind a sledge in minus 30 or 40 or 50 degrees, the white underfoot difficult to distinguish from the white above the horizon:

"I look no farther than the pony's hindquarters. To look any farther would be to see the bank of snow, appearing almost vertically in front of me. I don't want to see. I don't want to know. If I can just travel as far as the pony, if I can just do that. I look no farther. I celebrate each one of these small victories in silence, and then go on again. Sometimes I tell myself that when I reach that point just a little ahead of me we will stop and rest, or stop and make camp. But we don't. ... There is just more and more snow, more and more ice, and the only thing that changes is that sometimes it is deeper, sometimes softer, sometimes breaks away in pieces, and sometimes groans a little under foot or crunches. But it is all just snow. Or ice. Part of a slope that doesn't seem to end, just goes on and on, until my clothes are wet with effort."

When you walk away from this book what you're sure to take with you are Dudman's descriptions of ice, its different textures and temperatures and colors, rendered so vividly on the page you can almost feel its cold.

One Day the Ice Will Reveal All its Dead is not a straightforward account of a man, nor quite like anything I've read before. Often Dudman approaches the episodes of Wegener's life that she has elected to include obliquely, from some wholly unexpected angle. Here, for example, is Wegener during his days as an astronomy student at the University of Berlin, adding his corrections to the Alfonsine astronomical tables:

"It is a printed copy I hold now, a late edition, the famous Parisian one of 1545. The paper is cream, thick, wizened with age, and the printing is imperfect--some of the curved Latin letters have bled a little from their moulded fonts--for this is a new art, not yet properly mastered. The owners of these tables have made notes, and with time the ink has become a gentle sepia, unobtrusive, part of the book. I too am adding parts of myself to the pages: oils are leaking from the skin of my hands and molecules of fat are smearing themselves invisibly on its surface. Part of the book is also becoming part of me: some of the ink is leaching minutely from the paper and into my pores, and some of the grains of the paper are detaching themselves, floating into the air and being drawn irretrievably into my lungs. In these small ways we are blending together, the wizard and his book of spells."

It is of course always true to say that no two writers will get across the same piece of information in precisely the same way, but given an infinite number of writers instructed to describe Wegener at his astronomical computations, I can't imagine any producing a picture remotely like the one Dudman paints here.

My complaints about the book are few, and almost entirely unrelated to the writing itself. I found Dudman's final chapters slightly confusing, those in which she details Wegener's last, fatal expedition to Greenland. The explorer's movements might have been easier to follow, however, if a series of maps tracing Wegener's expeditions had been included in the book. I would also have appreciated the addition of a timeline and photographs. Perhaps these can be included in future editions.

Dudman has managed to blend the various aspects of Wegener the man--the scientist and explorer, sibling and son and husband and father--into a book that is equal parts science and poetry. The result is a startling accomplishment, and well worth the read.

[Disclaimer: I have come to know the author of One Day the Ice Will Reveal All its Dead virtually, through our respective blogs and by email. I hope that our acquaintance has not influenced my review of her book.]

Debra Hamel -- author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful, Poignant, and Complex Novel, June 8, 2004

By 

Jeff VanderMeer - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead (Hardcover)

The physicist who gave this book three stars wants the book to be something it isn't. It's not trying to be a biography of Wegener. If Dudman wanted to write a biography of Wegener, she would have. As it stands, she has instead written a poetic, wonderfully idiosyncratic and moving portrait of a life, complete with stunning adventure and complex relationships. By eschewing a traditional plot, Dudman has freed up her story and characters to be both more real and more immediate. Amazing work. One of my favorite novels of the past few years, right up there with Edward Carey's Observatory Mansions.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Exciting Scenes of Daring Adventures in Greenland, May 18, 2004

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead (Hardcover)

Those who love to read stories about dangerous, arduous expeditions to extend knowledge in Arctic regions will find this book to be a fine addition to the literature. From the preface discussion of ice through to the ending chapter, you will feel yourself enduring the difficulties of the various explorers as they trek where no one had gone before and measure what had not been studied before.

Normally, I prefer to read nonfiction books about scientists but in this case Ms. Dudman's imaginative, sensitive writing makes the novelistic journey to understanding Wegener a rewarding one.

Today, German meteorologist Alfred Wegener is best known for putting together the first well documented hypothesis about continental drift. But even in that context he is not well known. His ideas were widely derided during his life by geologists who disliked his poaching into their territory without academic credentials. As a result, memories of him and his work had largely died out by the time that continental drift was proven in the 1960s through the use of research methods unavailable during Wegener's life.

But Wegener was a man of many modes. As a young man, he and his brother established a duration record for balloon flight, and he participated in three scientific studies in Greenland . . . heading the last one at age 49. He also made scientific contributions to our understanding of how rain is formed and that meteorites helped produce many of the craters on the moon.

I decided to read the book because I wanted to know more about his role in the continental drift hypothesis. That aspect of the book receives relatively little attention, and I came away little more informed than I was when I began except to know more about what his critics had to say at the time. I graded the book down by one star for its lack of emphasis in this area.

What I found surprising and exciting was that Wegener was such an intrepid and successful Artic explorer. The parts about him in Greenland are very well done. If you want to read a book with that kind of orientation, I can strongly recommend this one. It will be a five star effort for you.

After the preface, the book gets off to a slow start in describing his early years. Be patient though. By page 52, the book begins to hit its pace. By page 71, you will find yourself engrossed in a way that will continue to the end.

Where can curiosity take you? What have you noticed that speaks to you . . . that no one else understands? How can you explain what it means so that others will see what you see?