Sara Wheeler first saw the Antarctic from the southernmost tip of
Chile, while travelling the length and breadth of that country for
a book she was writing. She knew then that she would return to a
place which already seemed like home. A polar desert, the Antarctic
is the province of scientific expeditions staffed by oddballs and
mavericks who feel more at home on the ice than anywhere else in
the world, but more than that, it has, over the years, come to
serve as a metaphor for an inner journey into the depths of the
soul. Fired by the exploits of Scott and Amundsen, Shackleton and
Cherry-Garrard, people have gone to the wild places of the earth to
meet themselves face to face, and Sara Wheeler was no exception.
Having got herself onto US Antarctic Writers' and artists' Program,
the first foreigner to do so, she prepared herself for the rigours
of life at the bottom of the world with a mixture of research and
polar training. Her book in turn reflects this; her love of the
subject is obvious, particularly her writing about those who
travelled ahead of her. She writes movingly of visiting Scott's hut
and other important Antarctic monuments. What is perhaps a
disappointment at times is the banality of life on the ice. For
every moment of mystic communion on the ice, there are many hours
of surprisingly ordinary incident in a most extraordinary place. As
Wheeler acknowledges, those who live in the Antarctic must devise a
hundred ways of getting along with one another but somehow one
senses that Wheeler never really gets to grips with the modern
Antarctic experience, and to some extent, as a visiting writer
rather than a participating researcher, how can she ever hope to?
Nevertheless, this is a fascinating account of daily life in the
last great wilderness. (Kirkus UK)
After writing two highly praised travel books, Sara Wheeler was invited by the American government to be the 1994 'Writer in Residence at the US South Pole Station'. She spent six weeks at the pole and on the edge of the infamous Ross Ice Shelf which finally defeated Fiennes and Stroud in their recent unsupported Antarctic crossing. She then joined the British Antarctic Survey for a month on the other side where oil and minerals are rich but too expensive to extract. She looked at how people live on the bases and how the landscape affects them. For her, Antarctica functions as Patagonia did for Bruce Chatwin, the myths and history carrying as much import as the ration of two two-minute showers a week or how the inhabitants let off steam and avoid hating each other in confined quarters.
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