Polar Bearings
The Last Continent. By Douglas Liversidge. (Jarrolds, 21s.)
Men Against the Frozen North. By Ritchie Calder. (Allen and Unwin, 16s.) North of Sixty. By Colin Wyatt. (Hodder and Stoughton, 17s. 6d.) The Great North. By Felice Bellotti. (Andre Deutsch, 21s.) Journey North. By Mena Orford. (Arthur Barker, 15s.)
THE problem for the author of the average travel book is how to say something original and signifi- cant about the country visited, there being rarely anything original or significant about the author. POI' the writer about the Arctic or Antarctic Circles, the problem would seem to be less acute. While we all know how fabulous it is to 'discover' Greece, or be charged by a peevish rhinoceros, or to run out of water in the middle of the Sahara, few of us are so familiar with the hazards and mysteries of the North and South Poles. To pro- duce an informative and readable book about these regions should not be so difficult. It is Particularly surprising, then, that all but one of these books should be so unsatisfactory.
The exception is The Lost Continent, by Douglas Liversidge, which soberly and factually tells the story of Antarctica, from the time the idea of a Southern land-mass first entered men's minds to the latest expeditions. Mr. Liversidge is alone among these authors in having a clear Idea of what he is trying to do : namely to provide a background 'which will make intelligible to the ordinary reader all the activity which is now proceeding at the bottom of the world.' His in- formative and intelligent book will admirably fulfil this function.
The intentions of Mr. Ritchie Calder in Men Against the Frozen North are worthy enough, but like all popular journalists, and unlike Mr. Liversidge, he is quite incapable of organising his material to any useful purpose. He starts by ask- ing certain relevant questions. How can the under- developed territory of the Canadian Arctic be put to good use by the United Nations? Can the frontiers of agriculture be extended into the Arctic regions? What is the likely effect of the gradual warming-up of the Northern hemisphere? But in the course of the book he only succeeds in demonstrating the great dangers of writing about scientific facts in such a way as to make them palatable to a popular audience. His method is to discuss scientific discoveries in terms of the people who make them, while his style and tone are adequately indicated by his opening sentences : 'On my way to the North Pole, I landed on the frozen ice of Reindeer Lake to have a slice of Mrs. Garbutt's blueberry pie. The precise location of that pie was 57° 55' N, 101° 35' W and, believe me, it deserved a latitude and longitude all to itself.'
Colin Wyatt's North of Sixty raises the problem of relevance and organisation even more acutely. For, while he covers much the same territory as Mr. Calder, he seems to have an even hazier idea of what he is trying to say about it. His ostensible message is that Eskimos (`the happy, lovable people who live in Canada's far North') have better morals than other folk. But for the most part he is content to record, with a staggering wealth of detail, his every daily action : a feat which argues nothing but the memory (not to say the powers of discrimination) of an elephant.
The Great North, by Felice Bellotti, is a col- lection of short, disconnected impressions of Scandinavia and the Arctic, under alarming head- ings like The Poetry of the North,' God's Kiss,' 'Spirits of the Dark' and 'The Smell of Night.' With a considerable effort, one is just prepared to tolerate people who talk about 'the poetry of the North,' but one will no longer tolerate them when they attempt to convey that 'poetry' by say- ing 'valour' whenever they mean 'courage,' and by indulging in such woolly, self-conscious flights as 'A rustle of wind shook intoxicating fragrance from the trees . . . the moss sighed,' etc. etc.
Journey North, by Mena Orford, is another of those grim stories in which a plucky white woman (this time a doctor's wife) celebrates the fact, through 200 pages of indifferent prose, that, after following her husband to some primitive land (this time Baffin she was able (thanks to her native grit and indomitable sense of humour) to overcome her prejudices against her new environment.
WILLIAM DONALDSON
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