15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Action, mystery and the slightest touch of the supernatural, June 1, 2007
Fourteen-year-old Symone is obsessed with Antarctic exploration. Ever since the death of her father, she has read every book and watched every movie she can find about Antarctica. She is particularly enamored with Capt. Lawrence "Titus" Oates, one of the explorers lost in the doomed Scott expedition. Titus is her companion and confidante, an imaginary friend who fills in for her grieving family and distant friends.
Outside of Titus, the only person to take an interest in Sym's life is her Uncle Victor, a family friend who has cared for the family since her father's death. Uncle Victor feeds Sym's interest in Antarctica and arranges for a trip to the frozen continent. There, Sym must face the White Darkness, a phenomena of the polar summer where the sun never truly sets and the only indication of night is white, unmarred by shadow.
Sym identifies with the purity, isolation and silence of the white continent. She sees herself as particularly suited to a place that others see as dead:
"God sketched Antarctica, then erased most of it again, in the hope a better idea would strike Him." Sym observes, "At the center is a blank whiteness where the planet isn't finished. It's the address for Nowhere...it mesmerized me. The idea of it took me in thrall. It was so empty, so blank, so clean, so dead. Surely, if I was ever to set foot down there, even I might finally exist. Surely, in this Continent of Nothingness, anything --- anyone --- had to be hugely alive by comparison!"
Sym does not know that she is a pawn in a larger conspiracy, subject to the fanatical beliefs of one man. Uncle Victor is obsessed with his own theories about discovery and becomes unhinged. He is less concerned with their ability to survive than in securing his place in history. Nasty secrets start to emerge as they travel across the ice. Sym must choose between trusting her uncle and listening to the inner voice she has always regarded as imaginary.
THE WHITE DARKINESS is told entirely from Sym's point of view, offering her wry observations of the other travelers and sharing her expertise on the subject of the Arctic. Author Geraldine McCaughrean's biggest challenge is convincing the reader that a smart girl like Sym would be taken in by the suspicious circumstances of her trip with Uncle Victor. McCaughrean succeeds by invoking other polar explorers, many of whom might be regarded as madmen, making discovery at the expense of their own lives.
The juxtaposition of Sym's adventure next to the Scott expedition --- which McCaughrean wisely summarizes in an appendix at the end of the book --- asks if death is too high a price to pay for discovery. The irony of the Scott expedition was that, as they chose to push on to discover the South Pole knowing they were unlikely to return, another explorer, Roald Almundsen, already had beaten them to the Pole by two weeks and lived to tell the tale. Had the Scott expedition survived, they would not have been the first to reach the Pole. They found more notoriety through death than they would have in life.
The Arctic regions are ideal for asking the big questions about ethics and morality because one's decisions, which might be regarded as opinions in ordinary life, hinge on life or death in such a harsh environment. Many 19th century writers were fascinated with the Arctic as a place representing the unexplored regions of the human psyche. In FRANKENSTEIN Mary Shelley sets the final showdown between creator and monster on the polar ice. Henry David Thoreau wrote about the Arctic explorers of his time in WALDEN saying, "...explore your own higher latitudes...there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold, storm and cannibals...than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific of one's being alone."
THE WHITE DARKNESS manages to ask some of these big questions without compromising plot or pace. It is a book filled with action, mystery and the slightest touch of the supernatural. Its strange story will be appreciated by readers interested in survival tales and the shadow side of human nature.
--- Reviewed by Sarah A. Wood
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25 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
wonderful premise, disappointing execution, October 8, 2007
After looking forward to this book for several months, I finally started it...and abandoned it within a day.
The premise, a teenager trapped in Antarctica and facing intrigue and life-or-death situations, was great. The main character's voice at the beginning was great. How's this for a beginning: "I have been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now--which is ridiculous, since he's been dead for ninety years. But look at it this way. In ninety years I'll be dead, too, and then the age difference won't matter."
I was all set to love the book and its main character, Sym. However, by the end of the first chapter it becomes clear that there's something wrong with her uncle, who is clearly the antagonist. He's obviously lying, perhaps crazy, certainly not a very nice person. Yet Sym doesn't catch on to this for most of the book. She's fourteen, old enough to notice and form her own opinions. When she goes blithely on her way, ignoring the obvious approaching plot of the book, I can't help losing respect for her character. It's like she's sleepwalking or just going according to the script.
When the reader has caught on to something and has to wait around for the main character to catch on too, and it doesn't happen despite ample evidence, it's hard to keep caring. I found myself flipping ahead to see if the book had turned the corner yet...nope...nope, not yet. I checked the ending to see how it came out (pretty much as expected), then regretfully put the book down.
I am really sorry that I experienced it this way, as the language and writing were often thoughtful and beautiful.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An insatiable lust for the Antarctic, July 6, 2008
Fourteen year-old Sym is a classic young adult protagonist - the partially deaf social outcast who loses herself in intellectual pursuits and gets the boy in the end. Sym is obsessed with the white darkness of Antarctica, which is the favorite subject of her stand-in father, the wannabe adventurer Uncle Victor. Uncle Victor and Sym share a private world of science and history which makes Sym's outward life more bearable, especially after the death of her father.
As the story opens, Uncle Victor surprises Sym with an elite tourist expedition to the South Pole. Victor reveals that he is on a quest for Symme's Hole, a secret, mythical entrance to an underground civilization at the center of the earth. The reader will quickly realize that Victor harms others in his singleminded pursuit of adventure, but our narrator is painfully blind to Uncle Victor's sociopathic behavior. She passively accompanies him without questioning why he stranded her mother at home, destroyed their cell phone, and drugged their friends on the expedition. As the novel unfolds further, Sym slowly realizes how manipulative and deceitful Uncle Victor has been her entire life, and she is faced with life-or-death survival in the company of a maniac.
THE WHITE DARKNESS is an adventure tale, a romance, and a coming-of-age story. The novel is lyrically beautiful on the subject of the South Pole, but the protagonist's extreme passivity and lack of awareness render parts of the narrative slow and frustrating to read. Still, I was hooked by the suspense, and I enjoyed the voyage through this queer, white world.
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