© 2007 by Dan Simmons
First, the prelimaries. Dan Simmons is a writing god.
First read him fifteen years ago, his masterpiece Hyperion, a science fiction epic mashing something like Alien with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I read it over the
course of a month, mainly while commuting in and out of NYC via train. Recall
fondly how I’d read it in Port Authority, leaning against a wall, while the
crowds flowed about me negotiating the inevitable delays, which never bothered
me so long as I had Simmons on me. The book was so good – too good, in fact –
that it intimidated me from ever reading anything further from this master.
That is, until I read The Terror.
I must say it’s been quite a while since I’ve read
such a page turner. The paperback clocks in at 955 pages, so I figured I’d be
reading it well past Halloween. Turns out I burned through it in two weeks.
What intrigued me most about the novel, and I must
admit I did not know it at first, is that it is a historical novel. That is,
based on true events. It happened that in 1845, Sir John Franklin embarked from
England with two of His Majesty’s ships to search for the fabled Northwest
Passage. Equipped with three years’ rations (five if under emergency measures),
the 129 men aboard the Erebus and the
Terror made contact with some whaling
vessels, left provisions and a note on Beechey Island in the Arctic Circle,
then became completely icebound a few weeks later.
The summer thaw never came. Nor the one the following
summer. Franklin died, and command turned over to Francis Crozier. Facing
starvation and mutiny, Crozier led his men south, hauling boats, tinned food
and equipment over ice and snow, in search of open water. The fate of the
expedition is uncertain, as there were no survivors. A few bodies were found,
years later, leading to speculation of infighting and cannibalism, but nothing
of certain could be determined as to what exactly claimed the lives of all 129.
In The Terror Dan
Simmons weighs in with his theory. That’s where Alien comes in.
Seems that something is stalking the men … something
out on the ice, out in the cold, dark fog of nights that last weeks. One by one
sailors and marines are killed, slaughtered, in gruesome and macabre ways. My
first thought was a monstrous polar bear, and that’s kind of where Simmons
leads in the first hundred or two pages, but the truth is actually more brutal,
more unstoppable, more alien than that. In fact, the antagonistic creature
reminded me of the monster-entity Shrike from Hyperion more than the lethal biological killing machine of Alien. Either way, though, I had to find
out how those cold, starving, desperate men would fare against their
inexplicable nemesis.
They do it with that admirable stoic ability rarely
seen nowadays outside of the military. And though the reader knows that no one
will survive, what does happen is surprising – some do. Rather, one does. Or
maybe two, depending on who you view as a member of the expedition. I kinda
sorta foresaw the ultimate explanation of the Terror, and while the ending
chapters seemed a bit loopy and hallucinogenic (a literary parallel to the
ending of Kubrick’s 2001, as a very
rough metaphor), the story’s resolution satisfied, if unsettled, me
satisfactorily.
The best thing about the book is Simmons’ writing, of
course. Every crewman comes alive – good, bad, and ugly. Lady Silence, a mute “Esquimaux”
who plays some role as the Terror slaying begin shortly after she arrives at
the ice-bound ships, Sir John Franklin in his pathetic misleading of the
expedition and his terrible fate, the suffering of scurvy, frostbite, lead
poisoning, the devolving into mutinous and loyal factions – all is brilliantly
portrayed in such a realistic fashion I lost myself in the prose.
So The Terror was
quite the pleasant surprise. I knew it would be good, but I thought it’d be an
ordeal. Turns out three or four hundred-page-a-day reads, due to the inability
to put the damn thing down, made it a great experience.
Grade: Solid, solid A, just a hair’s-breadth shy of
A-plus.
N.B.
1) Franklin’s “Lost Expedition” is the subject of tons
of literature, explored from various angles and points of view. Never knew
that. Might read some more about it.
2) Simmons followed this up with a novel called Drood, where – I assume – he gives
similar treatment to the final five years of the life of Charles Dickens. Might
read that, too, once I can get my hands on it
3) It also appears that AMC is in the process of
developing a miniseries of The Terror,
to premiere sometime in 2017. Should be interesting, and might give it a
look-see (television tends to ruin everything).
