Location: Home » The Ice Museum » Reviews

Reviews of The Ice Museum

This section contains full extracts from a selection of reviews:

Paul Watkins in the Times

Not for nothing did the ancients of this island pray, with limited success, to be delivered from the fury of the Northman. In the ferocity of Viking raiders and the landscape from which they emerged lay the archetypal shock and awe. The Vikings shared with us, however, a fear and fascination of the land beyond their own ice-bordered settlements. They called it Thule and it was known not only to the Scandinavians but to the Romans and the Greeks as well. First sighted by Pythias in the 4th century BC, and described as a land of perpetual light followed by perpetual darkness, lying six days north of Scotland, its location and existence have been disputed ever since.

Escaping from the confines of an urban life ("As spring broke across the grey-fronted houses, I knew I had to leave"), Joanna Kavenna joins the tribe of those restless spirits drawn to the outer reaches of the northern world. On a journey notable for its many dangers and lack of creature comforts, Kavenna's remarkable voyage takes her to those places once identified as Thule, including the Shetlands, Norway, Iceland, Greenland and, quite plausibly it turns out, Estonia. Travelling on foot, by train, seaplane, boat and helicopter, she encounters several Thule dreamers. Some, like Johannes the Icelandic poet ("I improvise in iambic pentameters"), are there because their people have been living in the North for centuries. Others, like the grizzled professor who speaks of Greenland as "a super-reality, a hyper-existent image of truth and destiny", have been lured by the same siren song as Kavenna herself. A few, like the two Scottish sisters whom she meets on a "smashed-up icebreaker" called the Aurora Borealis, are there because they have underestimated the North's "vista of emptiness... the vivid realisation of absence" and now cannot wait to get home. For this last group, no longer beguiled by, nor accustomed to, life on the outer reaches of the planet, the North is a terrible place, monochrome and barren, symbolising the opposite of what life is supposed to offer.

Kavenna's odyssey also leads her south to Bavaria, birthplace of the crypto-fascist Thule Society. For members of the club, "wringing their hands about the dilution of the German spirit through the addition of non-Aryan elements to the population", the myth of Thule offered a purity in which their schemes of racial ideology could flourish. In Munich, where society members gathered at the Old Bar of the Four Seasons Hotel, Kavenna receives cryptic answers to her questions about the group. "Everything is in darkness," she is told by a 6ft-tall professor named Ursula. "It remains in darkness, it will always remain in darkness."

Unlike the earlier explorations of Burton, Nansen and Rasmussen, whose search for Thule promised the chance of discovering an actual location on the map, Kavenna's walkabout through the murky borderlands between the real world and the world of the imagination offers no such possibility. Except for an American military base bearing the name, the actual location of Ultima Thule, as Virgil described it, will probably never be known, if it ever existed at all. But it is this very lack of final destination that makes Kavenna's story so compelling. In a style reminiscent of Lawrence Millman's Last Places and Colin Thubron's In Siberia, she vividly describes the landscape of the Shetlands ("the moss was a cold green shade, spectral in the half-light, and the stark cliffs rose to empty grass plains. As the evening fell, I stood on the empty cliff, looking at the sea stretching away towards the horizon. A frigid wind raced in from the sea. There was a brilliant wine-rich sunset"), of Iceland ("a land like a disaster film, a natural gore flick - the country scattered with the innards of the earth") and of Greenland, where the waves of Melville Bay were "like eels trapped under tin foil and the water was silver in the pale light". This, combined with telling details of the journey's changing effects upon her, make for an exceptionally readable narrative.

While the Earth's features have been satellite-imaged down to the smallest detail, some places have remained important to us for their ability to remain always beyond the horizon. To search for them is to embark upon a voyage both external and internal, whose prize is not a set of GPS co-ordinates but the journey itself, as Kavenna has so beautifully recorded in The Ice Museum.

Back to top

Paul Binding in the Spectator

In the fourth century BC a Greek, Pytheas, sailed north of Britain and found (in some sense of the word) Thule, bequeathing to posterity not just a name but a cluster of possibilities, a concept, a mystery, a challenge, a goal. In Thule, he reported, the tides congealed, sea-water turning to paste; in winter the ocean round it froze, in summer the sun shone day and night. Britain's Roman conquerors thought Thule must be the island's north, so confirming them in their pride as unique masters of the physical world; Tacitus put Thule in the present-day Shetlands. But whatever island or country Thule is deemed to be, it has over the subsequent centuries become a synonym for northernness in all its layers of meaning, geographical, climatic, cultural, spiritual, even metaphysical. And it is both the purpose and the achievement of Joanna Kavenna's exciting and profound book to make us appreciate how immensely important to all our world-views northernness is. By our images of it and by the values we attach to them, we define ourselves.

Thule or northernness can become a needed antidote to the softness and commercialism of elsewhere, the ultimate contrast to noise and busyness, and even to fecundity (which keeps us to this-worldliness). It offers prospects of enormous riches, but won't yield them to humankind without making it undergo gruelling hardships; no seductive oases, sportive beasts or glittering cities here. Thule stands for what is terrifying, indeed inimical in Nature, though seekers and finders, from dedicated Victorian travellers to its greatest hero and explorer Fridtjof Nansen, have been moved to the depths of their being by the beauty and majesty of northern mountains, fjords, ice-cap and floe- or berg-filled seas. Furthermore, wherever we locate Pytheas's discovery, the northern lands that contest for the name indubitably and indomitably exist, and by their existence influence the whole planet and its inhabitants, human and non-human.

Joanna Kavenna not only gave the candidature for Thule intensive thought, she visited each of the islands concerned - Shetland, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, the Sami (Lappish) country, Svalbard (formerly Spitsbergen). Her travels often entailed a radical jettisoning of what her predecessors had thought or written; she had to read the places afresh, for herself, as they stand now, while remaining attentive to their past significance and to the still awesome strengths of their natural landscapes. She could rely on a formidable battery of skills - as historian, in teasing out the annexation of Thule by Nazi ideologues, both German and Norwegian; as literary critic, analysing the Kalevala to understand better the relationship between Lapps and Finns; as social observer, as in her portrait of US military men up in their Greenland Cold War base actually called 'Thule', as lyric celebrant, everywhere, but nowhere more memorably than in her depictions of Iceland.

A particularly fascinating chapter deals with the one hypothesis about Thule that doesn't place it in the far north, but in the east of our continent, in Estonia. A meteorite falling on the island of Saaremaa may have brought about a trauma in the collective psyches of contemporary inhabitants and their successors. And the Estonian for fire is tuli. Kavenna's discourse here gives us a wonderfully clear and sympathetic account of how a myth can healingly be used by a small nation which has been through far too much and is now, with some difficulties of identity, finding its cultural and political feet.

The book ends appropriately with the furthest northern community in the world, in Svalbard, of scientists deployed to analyse the contemporary decrease in cold and ice (hence Kavenna's cryptic title), tentatively proffering alarming data and explanations. To think about Thule, therefore, is not just imaginatively exhilarating (which it certainly is) but a grave responsibility. And it is hard to envisage a more compelling or wiser guide than Joanna Kavenna to discharge it.

Back to top

Benedict Allen in the Independent on Sunday

Joanna Kavenna tells us how, tired of London, the Tube, the grey crowds, she lost the will to push herself forward. We can all sympathise, can we not? But she decided to exchange this 'endless sea of people' for a dark wasteland of the north.

Strange to relate, she was following in a grand tradition of poets, men of destiny and dreamers. Her objective was Thule, the Atlantis of the Artic, the mysterious and unfortunately misplaced island of the ice seas. The Greek navigator Pytheas started it all, in the fourth century BC setting out north from the Mediterranean and finding Thule among seas which were six days beyond Britain. Here the land, although inhabited, was plunged into winter blackness, the ocean, skies and land congealed into a viscous mass, and Pytheas, wisely one feels, chose to circumvent this unpromising, seething, thickening ocean and set sail for home.

The isle of Thule has been downright elusive ever since. As the ancient geographers went about plotting the rim of the known world they pondered where it might be. Great thinkers added their tuppence-worth. For Virgil, it was Ultima Thule, signifying remoteness and the very limit of the known. Strabo proclaimed Pytheas a fraud - plainly, Britain was the furthest inhabited land because there people lived in cold and misery. As the maps were filled in, Thule moved about. It was the Shetlands, it was Iceland, it was Norway. Or perhaps it was still out there, an elusive cold rock lost in the mists.

Thule was helpful however; for poets the word evoked notions of isolation, the beauty and majesty of a Land Beyond. Yet, as Kavenna reminds us, it also sprung up from time to time in the accounts of otherwise fairly level-headed explorers. As they contemplated the bleak ice-bound lands ahead, staring out into the screaming wind, they recalled the name Thule and found themselves 'pinning the word to the empty wilderness.' When the great Fridtjof Nansen wrote up his most famous Arctic adventure he too conjured the word from the cold ether, using it to evoke the terrible beauty of the north: we were to understand that he was a Norseman venturing beyond Thule, and so to the Pole - there he'd jab his flag into the ice, and so slay, in a sense, the dragon.

Kavenna's first port of call was Shetland, where happily she finds a bar called Thule. A promising start, you might think, but it looks like a prison and the sturdy drinkers whom she quizzes are baffled - one upsets his glass when she tries to pontificate upon the Roman historian Tacitus and his theories about the subject. Undaunted, she travels to Iceland, then Norway, Estonia, Greenland and Svalbard. There are more encounters; with the dull-witted; with philosophers half-crazed, one suspects, by the Northern Lights; and with the downright scary (the Thule Society, of which Hitler was a member, sought to trace out there the pure blood of the Aryan race).

Onward Kavenna ventures, wending her way in pursuit of the impossible - this dream of a virginal land 'that could never breathe or sweat as a crowded hopeless city or a history-strewn landscape could'. She brings along a plethora of other travellers, or rather their little musings on Thule - one of them the Arabist and explorer Richard Francis Burton, who, like her, carried 'the idea of Thule like hand-luggage.'

I must reveal here that the author does not find Thule. Or at least, not a wave-lashed, ice-capped rock of the north. Thule was, in many sea-faring tales, positioned not in the Arctic seas but between the earth and the world of the gods - that is, somewhere beyond the reach of mortals. And so it has proved to all seekers; the island remains out there somewhere but only as an unobtainable state. It's desirable but impossible. It taunts us. We are drawn to this place on the edge of our imagination, yet Thule has never promised to be paradise. The lonely isle expresses for us the ambivalence we feel, but can seldom grasp, in nature - the grandeur but also our unease in the face of the raw elements.

This is Thule's artful story, and Kavenna delivers it with easy erudition. The Ice Museum is neither travelogue nor essay but the expression of a heartfelt passion for dark myth and the far reaches of our imagination. Hers is a wonder voyage which never seems to tire; it has a ceaseless enchanting energy that washes over the reader as if from those restless seas. She is poetic, bold, and brave in language - it's an astoundingly self-assured debut. A sensitively poised, cherishable book.

Back to top