Customer Reviews

The Solitude of Thomas Cave

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
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Although it may seem a bit Robinson Crusoe-ish, this novel is one of the more intelligent and thought-provoking books I've read in a long time. It seemed to especially hit home for me as an occasional solo-traveler. At the heart of the story is a whaler named Thomas Cave who wagers on being able to survive a winter on Svalbard island and that his colleagues on the Heartsease will honor his wager and return to find him in a year.
Beneath the numbing and bleak story of Cave's survival lie various themes that I think the author wants the reader to consider.
- what do we make of personal relationships?
- how do we deal with memories, especially painful ones?
- do we suspect and isolate people because of our perceived fears of them, or rather internal fears that are merely the works of our mind?
- how do we deal with the environment around us? does it necessarily take an experience like Cave's to help us realize the environmental damage of some of our routine actions?

I feel that I've been better able to appreciate this story upon completing it. It seems to me that one can only truly appreciate and understand the value of Harding's work after reading all 237 pages of the book.

Definitely a worthwhile read.

Be forewarned! This is not "a bewitching ghost story" (the blurb on the back cover.) There is nothing light or inconsequential about this novel; it is difficult and at times brutal and painful, full of grandeur and profound sorrow. But then, you can't speak truthfully about human nature and human history without these qualities.

This book is an intense experience which also illuminates a brief but important period in history: whaling was perhaps the first episode in modern expoitation of the natural world and a paradigm of what was to come.

Ms. Harding's imagination of the central character is commanding and even awe-inspiring, as is her writing.

The Solitude of Thomas Cave is non-fiction author, Georgina Harding's first foray into fiction. It is set in the summer of 1616, on a whaling ship off the Island of Svalbard in the North Atlantic. The crew argues whether a man could survive the winter alone in the arctic wilderness. One sailor, Thomas Cave, insists that he could survive. His shipmates promptly bet £100 that he won't. Cave accepts the wager. His shipmates leave Cave on the treeless, uninhabited island, promising to return for him the following year.

Cave initially thrives in his frozen Eden, rising to the challenge of wilderness survival. However, after ingesting toxic polar bear liver, Cave becomes ill and falls into a coma. When he regains consciousness, his pregnant wife is with him. At first, he welcomes the hallucination, chatting amiably with his phantom mate. When she disappears, he longs for her return. With each successive hallucination, Cave becomes more anxious and disturbed. Soon his phantom infant son starts appearing as well, so lifelike Cave can feel the warmth of his body.

The first two-thirds of the novel concern Cave's efforts to survive the arctic winter and the mind-bending loneliness he experiences. This portion of the book is written in the third person, as if the reader is an undetected presence observing all that Cave goes through. Enough of Cave's past is revealed to explain why an intelligent, resourceful man such as Cave might agree to such a foolhardy wager. This portion of the book is written very beautifully and convincingly. If I were to rate the book based upon this first section alone, it would merit an unqualified five stars.

There is a sharp break in the story two-thirds of the way through. The final third of the novel concerns the aftermath of the wager. This portion is told in the form of a narrative written by one of Cave's shipmates twenty-four years later in 1640. The shipmate is struggling to understand the incident and the changes it wrought in Cave's personality. The writing in this portion of the novel is uneven and is somewhat of a letdown after the fine writing and dramatic storytelling in the first section of the novel.

The language and manner of speaking employed in the first portion of the novel are roughly in keeping with 17th Century England. Surprisingly, the shipmate's narrative in the second portion is written in a more contemporary style. For example, the shipmate uses an anthropological term that wasn't coined until the late 19th Century. Still, I am favorably impressed with this fascinating debut novel. This psychological study of loneliness, human need and mankind's relationship with nature is quite compelling. I look forward to more fiction by this author.

I did enjoy this book, but it was dry at times, and the character's modern views at the end nearly ruined it for me. The book is based on a bit of historical hearsay presented by an Icelandic writer who visited Spitsbergen in 1619. In a talk with English whalers he was told how a few years ago an Englishman had wagered to stay the entire winter in Fairhaven (modern Scheibukta, on the southern side of Smeerenburg fjord), and survived. The English claimed this had occurred in 1616-17. From this historical hearsay Harding wrote her book. She keeps the date, but moves the wintering from the northwest coast of Spitsbergen to Duke's Cove, on the west coast of Edge Island. The English had only come across the island in 1616, so it is strange to place the wintering here. Also, no Hull ship had visited the island at such an early date. Yes, it is historical fiction, but I find such changes annoying.

She apparently did some research into bay whaling in Svalbard in the first half of the seventeenth century, but not enough. She has Thomas Goodlard, one of the main characters, telling Cave that the Dutch had built a settlement on the main island called Smeerenburg, where thousands of men spent their summers. The myth of Smeerenburg would not have existed so early on. The settlment probably hadn't even been named yet. To the English and everyone else it would have just been another whaling settlement, and one in the low hundreds (the myth of thousands of workers was created years' later). Harding must have not known of the archaeoglogical investgations in 1979-81 that had proven the size of Smeerenburg. Also, Smeerenburg was built on Amsterdam Island, a tiny island lying off Spitsbergen's northwest coast; not on the main island itself. This could have been the character's error, but looks more like the author's instead.

A sailor makes a bet with his crewmates that he can spend a winter alone on an Arctic island. They leave him with food, shelter, and weapons, never expecting to see him again. In the remaining pages, he experiences hunger, freezing temperatures, vivid hallucinations, and meets the true face of God Himself. The wisdom he gains from nature is an attitude of calm in the face of the sheer chaos represented by the unadulterated wilderness. The language is poetic and gorgeous, the tale itself a lyrical commentary about humanity's impact on nature. But don't be fooled by the paltry 200-page length of this little book. This tale of a seventeenth century Moses is by no means a light read: it's about as dry and slow-moving as parables come.

I've always wanted to tell people I picked up a book on impulse read it on the plane. Now I have done so!

Finding myself in a duty-free shop with a sudden distaste for the book I had brought, I picked this one up, thinking it would substitute nicely.

Well, for a book that you pick up in the airport, this was a dense, difficult read. It's literary fiction, about a sailor who makes a bet that he can survive for a year in a remote Arctic outpost. As far as I know, the thing is spun of whole cloth: it is not based on anything that actually happened. (Not sure about this, though.) At any rate, despite seeming short, this book is such slow going that it'll take you a while to read.

There's one thing I wish somebody had warned me of before I started reading it. Thomas Cave, in an attempt to fend off starvation, consumes a polar bear's liver about a third into the book. (The liver of this animal is supposed to be toxic to humans.)

Cave survives but only after going through pages and pages of hallucinations on account of having eaten this liver. I'm a little thick: I didn't understand the narrator was supposed to be tripping for a good fifty pages and consequently found the middle third of the novel mighty confusing.

The Solitude of Thomas Cave by Georgina Harding,is a fictional account of a man who stubbornly agrees on a wager to stay alone all winter on an arctic island. Left behind by his fellow crewmen of the North Atlantic whaler The Heartsease, Thomas Cave must find a way to endure the cold, the darkness, and most importantly, the utter loneliness of an Arctic winter. The time is 1616, and whalers from many countries ply the polar seas to reap the rich bounty of whales and other sea life. But no one has ever voluntarily stayed behind after the whaling season, and the men who leave Thomas Cave, standing alone on the island's edge are sure they are leaving him to die.

Thomas keeps a journal as a way to mark the passage of time and keep his mind from going numb. Should he not survive, he believes his journal will serve as a record and guide to those who may eventually find his body. Carefully he plans a daily routine to include food rationing, hunting, and writing. As the weather grows more bitter, he forces himself out of his hut each day, to keep from falling into a deathly torpor.

But with so much solitude there is no escaping thought; and thought brings memories; and memories, deep sadness, as Thomas is overwhelmed with memories of his wife and son, both long dead. In addition to those tormenting thoughts, Thomas recalls many details of whaling trips, some of them quite brutal, demonstrating man's inhumanity to man and to all of earth's other creatures. Yet despite these often melancholy thoughts, Thomas is determined to survive his ordeal and to gain something profound and life changing from it.

The story is quite solemn and moving and proves that in the hands of a gifted writer, even a short novel can have a powerful impact. Read The Solitude of Thomas Cave for its contemplative exploration of what defines us as humans. But read it also for its quite realistic depictions of a man battling some the most brutal conditions on earth.

BEFORE MAKING A RASH COMMITMENT CONSIDER ALL THE RAMIFICATIONS. THOMAS CAVE DID NOT!