[Werthead]

In the summer of 1845, the Royal Navy dispatched two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, under the command of Sir John Franklin to the Arctic Ocean. Their orders were to enter the Canadian Arctic Archipelago by means of Lancaster Sound (west of Greenland) and seek out the North-West Passage, which would lead them to the Pacific via the Bering Strait and thus home by way of Russia, China and India. Whilst both the eastern and western edges of the Passage had been explored by this time, no ship had successfully travelled the entire length of the Passage.

Neither ship was heard from again.

Over the following years, concern over the expedition's fate grew and many search and rescue expeditions were launched, some by ship and others by foot, travelling up the rivers from the Canadian interior. A number of relics and remains were found, confusingly scattered across a large area of more than a hundred miles surrounding King William Island, and over time other expeditions have pieced together the facts, upon which the narrative of The Terror is based.

The Terror, like Stephen Donaldson's Gap series and George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, uses a rotating third-person limited point of view system, moving between several characters. The narrative opens in late 1847 with the two ships forced to spend a second winter in a row stuck fast in the ice. Extensive flashbacks and diaries record the earlier stage of the expedition, with optimism over finding the North-West Passage turning to despair as the ships make little progress against the ice. After being snowed in at King William Island, an unidentified predator starts stalking the crews, accounting for many lives including that of Sir John Franklin, leaving Captain Crozier of the Terror in command of the expedition. Discovering that the ships' stores are contaminated by an unknown source (later - in real life - revealed to be lead poisoning from either the inadequately-sealed tinned foods or the water tanks) and they cannot survive another winter, in April 1848 Crozier makes the decision to strike out for the Canadian mainland by foot and attempt to follow the Back River to civilisation.

The Terror is a meticulously researched novel. Simmons has clearly done his homework here, further evidenced by the considerable bibliography. The details of shipboard life are fascinating, and Simmons is painstaking in ensuring that the reader understands at all times the options and problems facing the expedition's leaders, most notably the paralysis that grips them when presented with the option of abandoning ship and continuing overland and over the ice on foot, or hoping that a summer thaw will free their ships. The characters - virtually all of whom are given the names of the real Franklin Expedition crewmen - are vividly drawn, from the flawed but nonetheless charismatic and professional Crozier to the bumbling Franklin to the naive but eventually heroic surgeon Goodsir to the perpetually cheerful Blanky, and the use of them to tell the story is very well done, although there is a pause when Simmons has some of the crew doing some very unpalatable things with no evidence those individuals ever did those things in reality. However, that is often the case with fictionalizing real events. Simmons also nails the biting, freezing atmosphere of the Arctic and imbues the story with some very atmospheric descriptions of the frozen ice landscapes.

The problem with the book is the presence of the 'thing on the ice' (a deliberate nod to the 1951 movie The Thing From Another World), a terrifying monster which shows up at almost regular intervals to kill a few people, sometimes mutilating them (apparently for pleasure), before vanishing. The first time this happens it is effectively shocking. Around the fifth or sixth it starts to get a bit boring, even comical. The monster is also highly reminiscent of the Shrike, Simmons' superb creation from his Hyperion Cantos series of SF novels, and although the monster in The Terror isn't quite as godlike (nor does it have a giant metal tree to impale people on), its abilities will feel very familiar to anyone who has read the earlier work. Eventually an interesting explanation is given for the creature, cleverly based on Inuit mythology, but it literally comes in the final two chapters of a 950-page novel, long after the creature's appearances have stopped raising any genuine feelings of tension or fear. Also, the non-monster sections are as well-written and gripping as the bits where it does appear, making the storyline feel a bit redundant. When the genuine horrors of surviving in the Arctic with poisoned supplies and dwindling hopes are this compelling, why throw in a mutant fourteen-foot-tall polar bear with big sharp pointy teeth on top of that? Whilst thematically interesting, the presence of the monster feels like it cheapens some of the genuine accomplishments of the real Franklin Expedition.

The Terror (****) is often brilliant, but it is overlong and the monster is overused, robbing it of its power. Ignoring that, this is a gripping and fascinating novel of man's desire to survive no matter the odds. The novel is available in the UK from Bantam and the USA from Little, Brown.

[Dag]

Thanks for the great review, Wert.

It mirrors pretty much how I felt about this book, but I just wanted to add that my experience with Terror, when I started reading it last autumn, was that at first I simply couldn't get into it - I thought that maybe the constant switches between the narrators (and the narrating style - from events told in present tense over flashbacks and diary entries) were what kept throwing me out of the reading rhythm. So I gave it up for a while. Then Stone Monkey suggested I should try reading the book in winter... and it worked. It is definitely a book for winter - I read it over the past few weeks, while Vienna was buried in snow, and suddenly the book got a whole new context for me. Every time I waited for a subway freezing I just had to think about Crozier & Co stranded in ice and all of a sudden the world around me felt friendly and warm. And the Thing on Ice gets a completely new level of creepiness if one reads about it in the night while the windows are covered in frost and there are snowflakes the size of pigeon eggs falling outside. So, for those who have this book on their to-read pile, I'd say it's definitely not a book to be read in Summer on the beach... grab it now, or wait until next winter.

[ch'arlz]

Werthead, on Feb 26 2009, 05:30 PM, said:

The Terror (****) is often brilliant, but it is overlong and the monster is overused, robbing it of its power. Ignoring that, this is a gripping and fascinating novel of man's desire to survive no matter the odds.

Nice review, Wert! If it wasn't a Dan Simmons novel I wouldn't have persisted to the end. When I've read several hundred pages and am still going "WTF" then I usually go to the next book in my to read stack. The last part of the book made up for the laboured start, however. It's nowhere near his best work tho.

[amphibian]

I can pretty much co-sign everything above - except for Cha'arlz saying it's not among his best work. I think that, as a single volume, this works better than the Hyperion books. I liked the Ice Terror better than the Shrike.

[stone monkey]

Good review Wert; you managed to express some of my own misgivings about the book better than I would have.

Ta very much for the props Dag but, as I'm sure I mentioned to you at the time, that particular take on the book is purely the result of a happy(?) accident as I first read it in the middle of last February, when it was abso-bloody-lutely freezing here. Method Reading, if you will...

As you mentioned, when you can walk out of the house and literally see the ambient moisture in the air crystallising out in little glimmering shards that hang before your eyes like glittering dust, Crozier and his crew's situation becomes all that more immediate to you... That, coupled with Simmons' visceral prose - the sentences describing the physical sensations of extreme cold in numbing detail practically have icicles hanging from them - make the experience of reading the book almost gruelling. The only book that comes close to having a similar effect is Peter Hoeg's borderline sf Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow.

As prose stylists go, both in and dare-I-say out of the genre, Simmons is one of the best. He doesn't seem to be able to write a boring sentence. He does have a tendency towards melodrama that can be slightly offputting at times but when he harnesses it and remains focused on telling his story, he doesn't put a foot (or word) wrong.

Back to the book... I felt that the early parts, with the ships trapped on the ice and the oppressive presence of something out there in the endless cold are among the most effective. And Simmons evokes the almost alien mentalities of his mid-Victorian characters very well. The end is less less satisfying imo. I agree that once the Beast is explicitly seen the sense of dread that even the prospect of its appearance held in the early part of the book is gone. I do suspect Simmons wrote himself into a corner on that one, you can't tease the reader forever, after all, but once you've seen the monster its effect is unfortunately diminished somewhat.

I would recommend the book (and indeed have) because I feel that, despite its flaws, it is a very absorbing reading experience.

[Astra]

Nice review, Wert.

[Dr Trouble]

This was one of my favorite reads of last year.

Good review, Wert.

But my favorite thing about it the book? The cover. stone monkey talks of method reading, unfortunately when I read the book I was in the middle of a horrible summer so I had nothing to draw on. But that cover, with the bodies in the snow and the man propped up in the vast ice waste in a black coat. Every time I went to open up the book that thrilling picture set the mood for me.

It's my favorite cover art ever.

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[RodeoRanch]

Thanks for the reviews, guys! I've been waiting to pick this on up for awhile. I'll think I'll grab it and "Drood" at the same time.

I've not read not much Simmons. The only ones I've read were "Olypmos" and "Illium" and I loved the hell of out of 'em.

[Aptorian]

Ohh! Rodeo go pick up the Hyperion Cantos right now! It's the best sci-fi I've ever read.

And while you're at it, isn't about time you got yourself updated on the Malazan series?

[RodeoRanch]

Hey, I'm to update! Read 'em all. I don't have a clue what's going on anymore but that's normal.


Sounds like I'm going to have go on a Simmon's buying spree.

[drinksinbars]

have way through, damn good so far.

[RodeoRanch]

Finished this a ways back. Fantastic novel. Genuinely thrilling and creepy. Far better than his next effort "Drood."