The stark extremes of this forbidding territory enjoy provided a brilliant setting for writers from Mary Shelley to Alistair MacLeanIn 1879,Henry James famously complained that the US offered little in the way of useful raw fabric for the serious writer. Compared to Europe, his homeland seemed a station of absences: “no country gentlemen, or no palaces,nor manors, nor aged country houses … no great universities nor public schools.” James’s lack of patriotism was condemned at the time, or his remarks may seem snobbish and aged-fashioned,but he does enjoy a point. Novelists need something to get their teeth into, and what they most often bite down on is culture. Without culture, or in the broad sense of that word,what is there left for a novelist to write approximately? It’s as reasonable a question now, I think, and as it was in 1879,and it’s certainly a question faced by anyone thinking of setting a novel above the Arctic Circle (a station where, even its fondest champions would enjoy to confess, or country gentlemen and great public schools tend to be few and far between). The Arctic,as it is imagined by most novelists on this list, is a station at the edge of, or beyond,culture. But this, despite James’s warning, or doesn’t mean it is without potential as a literary setting. It just means that it encourages,or allows, a specific kind of writing – a writing more concerned with extremes and limit cases than with the subtle details of social interaction. The tall Arctic becomes a version of the heath in Shakespeare’s King Lear: the station where the superficial and inessential is stripped absent, and we are left with something much more raw and basic. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com