In Andrea Barrett's extraordinary novel of Arctic and personal exploration, maps are deceitful, ice all-powerful, and reputation more important than truth or human lives. When the Narwhal sets sail from Philadelphia in May 1855, its ostensible goal is to find the crew of a long-vanished expedition--or at least their relics--and be home before winter. Of course, if the men can chart new coasts and stock up on specimens en route, so much the better. And then there's the keen prospect of selling their story, fraught with danger and discovery, to a public thirsting for excitement. Zeke Voorhees, the Narwhal's young commander, is so handsome that he makes women stare and men "hum with envy"--perhaps not the best qualification for his post--but he seems loved by all. Only his brother-in-law-to-be, a naturalist, quietly mistrusts him, though he's determined to stand by the youth for his sister Lavinia's sake. At 40, eternal low-profiler Erasmus Darwin Wells has one disastrous expedition behind him and is praying for another scientific chance. He is, however, familiar with the physical risks they're taking, as well as the "long stretches when nothing happened except that one's ties to home were imperceptibly dissolved and one became a stranger to one's life." And what of the women left behind? Lavinia knows little of the dangers of ice (though she's well schooled in isolation) and lives only for Zeke's return. Her companion, Alexandra Copeland, is less sanguine. Even after she's been given a secret career break--ghosting for an ailing engraver--she knows how invisible she is and how threatening her family's "dense net of obligations" will always be. Though they get less page time, Barrett is in fact as concerned with these women as she is with her seafarers. Like the heroines of her National Book Award-winning Ship Fever, who bump up against science and history in which only men's triumphs are written, they must somehow escape social tyranny or retreat into the consolations of storytelling or silence. There is tyranny on board the Narwhal as well, as Zeke alternates between good will and paranoia, his closest companion an arctic fox he has "civilized" and who sits on his shoulder "like a white epaulet." (Alas, Sabine, like many of the men, is not to survive the journey.) Encounters with the Esquimaux--who might know more about the lost expedition than they're willing to share--not having gone according to plan, Zeke determines in late August to head for Smith Sound rather than home, despite the crew's protests. By mid-September, however, the craft is ice-locked, and it's clear they'll have to "winter over." At first the men make the best of their situation, magically sculpting cottages, castles, palaces, even a whale--and offering informal seminars in butchery, Bible studies, and basic navigation. However, as the weather worsens and Zeke grows increasingly despotic, morale plummets. Barrett excels in both physical and social description, writing with a naturalist's precision and a passionate imagination. With quick strokes (backed up by intense research), she can fill us in on some sensible but threatening Esquimaux footgear: "All five were dressed in fur jackets and breeches, with high boots made from the leg skins of white bears. The men's feet, Erasmus saw, were sheltered by the bears' feet, with claws protruding like overgrown human toenails. Walking, the men left bear prints on the snow." The author also shines in panoramic scenes--her descriptions of the Arctic can only be called magnificent--and in small, precarious, personal moments. When Erasmus eventually returns to Philadelphia, minus his toes and his future brother-in-law, a grieving Lavinia takes to her bed. Eventually, however, she relents: "Lavinia stared straight ahead. Straight at Erasmus, her right hand tucked in her lap while her left turned a silver spoon back to front, front to back, the reflections melting, re-forming, and melting again.... Lavinia said softly, 'I forgive you.' Everyone knew she was speaking to Erasmus." The Voyage of the Narwhal is full of blood-freezing surprises, a score of indelible characters, and heart-stopping mysteries. As Erasmus watches Alexandra draw landscapes he has seen before but missed something in, each pencil stroke is "like a chisel held to a cleavage plane: tap, tap, and the rock split into two sharp pieces, the world cracked and spoke to him." Readers of Andrea Barrett's novel will experience this sensation again and again. Packed with harsh truths about the not-always-true art of discovery, it is also among the most emotionally wrenching, subtle works of the century. --Kerry Fried


From Publishers Weekly
Having honed her craft in four previous novels and the NBA-winning short-story collection Ship Fever (1996), Barrett delivers a stunning novel in which a meticulous grasp of historical and natural detail, insight into character and pulse-pounding action are integrated into a dramatic adventure story with deep moral resonance. In Philadelphia in 1855, naturalist Erasmus Darwin Wells?40, unmarried and gripped by a despondent realization that his life is a failure?sees a last chance to make his reputation as he prepares to accompany his future brother-in-law, Zechariah Voorhees, on a voyage to the arctic in search of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition. At 26, Zeke bristles with charisma, and a megalomaniacal sense of his own destiny. But loyal, naive Erasmus doesn't grasp the scope of Zeke's recklessness and blind ambition until Zeke has committed a series of colossal and fatal blunders, subjecting his men to unspeakable privation, hunger, cold and danger. When the crew finally refuses to accompany Zeke on a foolhardy mission and he goes off alone and does not return on schedule, Erasmus is placed in an exquisite dilemma: whether to force the men to gamble on Zeke's unlikely survival as the ice closes in for a second winter, or?as he knows he must do?abandon the ship and begin a harrowing trek over land and water in hope of rescue. Erasmus's eventual return home, where he is scorned by journalists, who accuse him of cowardice, and by his sister, Lavinia, who is bereft of her hopes of marriage, is underscored by further ironies so potent that readers will finish the last third of the book in a fever of anticipation and dread. As Barrett describes the provisioning of the Narwhal, the flora and fauna of the arctic, the turbulent seas and breathtaking scenery, the plot seems slow to develop. But her careful depiction of all the characters?a humane ship's doctor; a cook who survived the Irish famine; and, back in Philadelphia, spirited Alexandra Copeland, whose presence in the Wells household as companion to Lavinia eventually leads to an affecting love story?deepens the narrative texture. Meanwhile, the extremes of both human behavior and nature?looming icebergs, fatal accidents, episodes of heroism, grisly discoveries of lost ships and dead men, the inexorable tyranny of winter darkness?are described with an accuracy that make one forget that this is not a memoir but a work of the imagination. The denouement, when it arrives, is a triumph: a confluence of justice, retribution, spiritual faith, metamorphosis and love. Maps and illustrations. Agent, Wendy Weil; editor, Carol Houk Smith. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In 1855, the Narwhal sets sail on a mission to find Sir John Franklin, lost while exploring the Arctic. On board is timid naturalist Erasmus Wells, whose sister is affianced to the ship's commander, Zeke Voorhees. The Arctic waters may be unforgiving, but they're not nearly as dangerous as Zeke's overriding ambition to make his name by finding Franklin. Barrett puts us on the deck of that ship, letting us feel the fear and the bitter cold; her prose has all the brilliance and heft of a looming iceberg. A novel of 19th-century grandeur that exhibits 20th-century sleekness and control. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


A New York Times Notable Book of 1998; New York Times Book Review, 6 December 1998
A British naturalist turns a search for Franklin's disappeared Arctic expedition of 1845-47 into a voyage of self-discovery in a historical adventure novel.


The New Yorker, 12 October 1998
While we ache for Erasmus to notice his own opportunities for love and for heroism, we get to luxuriate in the promise of retribution and in finely calibrated, persuasive prose.


Times [London], Erica Wagner, 25 February 1999
Andrea Barrett's remarkable novel, "The Voyage of the Narwhal," opens a reader's eyes...in choosing the past as her setting she sweeps away images and ideas that clutter the mind, and makes us see what she describes as if for the very first time....[A]n original, memorable voice. "The Voyage of the Narwhal" is strange and rare, a journey to the unexplored lands that live in distant latitudes and exist in us all. Wrap up warm and come aboard.


The New York Times
Powerful. . . . The Voyage of the Narwhal is an adventure story in the way that Conrad's Lord Jim and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' are adventure stories: the story's extreme conditions and harrowing experiences, which make for such gripping reading, are actually moral and spiritual tests that strip away the characters' public masks and expose their innermost drives and fears.


USA Today
The Voyage of the Narwhal is a wonderful book in the truest sense of the word--wonder-filled.


From Booklist
Barrett has already won the National Book Award for Ship Fever , but her newest book, a dynamic and insightful historical novel, is even more prizeworthy. Once again, Barrett has steeped herself in the past, in this case, the annals of Arctic exploration, and responded with keenly perception and original fiction rich with imaginative forays into the minds of both real-life people and invented characters. Her focus is the 1855 voyage of the Narwhal, which was organized to find the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin, but in this telling metamorphoses into something far more complicated due to the passions of the captain and his close associate, the scholarly naturalist Erasmus Darwin Wells. Their Arctic ordeal is a classic tale of the sea complete with mythic danger, maniacal quests, and the terrible beauty and dangers of the ocean itself. Authoritative and imaginative on all fronts, Barrett tells a gripping story shaped by masterful interpretations of the paradigms of science and the volatile nature of the mind, a wilderness every bit as challenging as the forbidding Arctic. Donna Seaman

FROM OUR EDITORS

In the stories of her 1996 National Book Award-winning collection, Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett explored the human passions at work behind a dazzling array of scientific endeavors. Now, in The Voyage Of The Narwhal, Barrett has enlarged upon that theme to create an extraordinary chronicle of 19th-century Arctic exploration, an intellectually and emotionally satisfying tale of adventure, ambition, tragedy, and redemption that transports the reader from the sitting rooms of 19th-century Philadelphia to the uncharted reaches of the frozen North and back again.

The year is 1855, a time when "Arctic hysteria," engendered by the published accounts of explorers such as John Rae, Charles Wilkes, John Richardson, and Elisha Kent Kane, has captured the popular imagination on both sides of the Atlantic. The largest and most elaborately provisioned Arctic expedition, led by Sir John Franklin of England, has disappeared without a trace, and the fate of Franklin, his two ships, and 500-man crew has become an international concern. Rescue parties have been hastily organized, only to go missing themselves.

Barrett's protagonist is the introspective Erasmus Darwin Wells, son of a prosperous Philadelphia engraver and amateur naturalist. From an early age, Erasmus and his similarly monikered brothers, Copernicus, Linnaeus, and Humbolt, are encouraged to share in their father's scholarly enthusiasms. Thoroughly schooled in the scientific method, Erasmus often puzzles over his father's fondness for Pliny the Elder's highly subjective record of the divergent races of man: On summer evenings, down by the creek, Mr. Wells had read Pliny's Natural History to his sons. Pliny the Elder had died of his scientific curiosity, he'd said; the fumes of Vesuvius had choked him when he'd lingered to watch the smoke and lava. But before that he'd compiled a remarkable collection of what he'd believed to be facts. Some true, some false -- but even the false still useful for the beauty with which they were expressed, and for what they said about the ways men conceived of each other, and of the world.

Erasmus gradually comes to understand that through these stories "in which truth and falsehood are mingled like the minerals in granite," he has been "taught to understand that anything you can imagine is possible."

As a young man, Erasmus joins Charles Wilkes's South-Sea Exploring Expedition as a "scientific." But the disastrous three-year voyage and Wilkes's subsequent court-martial tinge Erasmus's professional career and private life with the indelible mark of failure. Now, at the age of 40, he once again finds himself playing a supporting role to another man's vaulting ambitions. Zechariah Voorhees, a longtime friend of the Wells family who is betrothed to Erasmus's sister, Lavinia, is the latest to mount an expedition to learn Franklin's fate. At Lavinia's urging, Erasmus masters his reluctance to join a mission that by right of age and experience he should command, and accepts a commission as Zeke's right-hand man.

After months of careful planning and provisioning, the Narwhal and its 15-man crew embarks from Philadelphia in June. During the weeks at sea, Erasmus cultivates a rare friendship with the ship's Swedish surgeon, Dr. Boerhaeve. Though Boerhaeve is an admirer of Thoreau and espouses the curious creationist views of Louis Agassis, and Erasmus, true to his namesake, is a staunch Darwinist, the two lifelong bachelors recognize each other as intellectual equals who share the desire to better understand the world through exploration. With each new landfall, the two scientists hastily collect and classify specimens of flora and fauna, until they guiltily begin to wish that the expedition's objective could be abandoned in favor of observing this "amazing place and its creatures."

As the brief Arctic summer draws to a close without any sign of Franklin or his men, tension mounts between Zeke, the ship's officers, and the crew. The accidental death of one of the men delays the departure of the Narwhal long enough for relics of the Franklin expedition to be found among a nearby tribe of Esquimaux, and Zeke arrogantly proclaims the "hand of God" in the discoveries. Privately, Erasmus and Boerhaeve are less eager to accept the death of a comrade as evidence of divine intervention. Moreover, the Narwhal now finds her homeward path blocked by ice at every turn, and the crew is forced to prepare to winter over.

During the cramped confinement of the long, dark Arctic winter, scurvy, depression, and the incremental breakdown of the chain of command take their toll. One by one, crew members are sacrificed to Zeke's megalomaniacal ambition to put his name on the map; not even the good Dr. Boerhaeve is spared. The tragically unnecessary death of his first and only friend at last awakens Erasmus to his duty to the men of the expedition, and when Zeke marches off alone in search of the inland polar sea rumored to lie beyond the ice pack and fails to return, Erasmus reluctantly abandons the icebound ship and leads the crew to safety. On the voyage home, Erasmus, crippled by frostbite and devastated by the loss of the Narwhal's discoveries, overhears a whaling captain contemptuously refer to his breed of gentleman explorers as ineffectual "discovery men." And in one of Dr. Boerhaeve's last journal entries, he finds a ghostly, eloquent echo of this rebuke:What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is explain the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

The doomed expedition is a compelling, multileveled story, yet the voyage itself is but a prelude to the moral drama still to unfold. Fully a third of the book takes place after Erasmus returns to Philadelphia. Within the fabric of Zeke and Erasmus's tale, Barrett has woven the stories of the two women who await their return -- Lavinia, who measures her worth solely in relation to her love for Zeke, and her hired companion, Alexandra, who compares the narrow choices open to her with the opportunities afforded men, and muses, "Why can't my life be larger?" Alexandra's situation is reminiscent of Barrett's short story "Rare Bird," which portrays the smothering paternalism of the 18th century through the eyes and emotions of a fiercely intelligent amateur naturalist who, like the elusive swallows she studies, escapes captivity for more hospitable climes. Here, too, are the vividly imagined voices of the "uncivilized" Esquimaux who endure the clumsy intrusion of the kabloonas -- white men -- into their delicately ordered society, only to suffer captivity and humiliation in return for their hospitality.

In The Voyage Of The Narwhal, Andrea Barrett portrays the breathless mood of a nation at odds with itself, distracted for a brief, glorious moment from the bitter rivalries that will soon erupt in a paroxysm of war. Her stunning synthesis of period historical detail and the natural sciences results in a voice that is at once passionate, lucid, and uniquely her own. Through the juxtaposition of stark contrasts and violent extremes, Barrett questions our expectations of the heroic and, ultimately, reaffirms our faith in the endurance of the human spirit.

--Greg Marrs

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Part adventure narrative, part love story, this extraordinary chronicle captures a crucial moment in the history of exploration, the mid-19th-century romance with the mystery of the Arctic. Combining fact and fiction, Andrea Barrett focuses on Erasmus Darwin Wells, a scholar-naturalist accompanying the expedition of the Narwhal. Through his eyes we meet the various crew members and the expedition's blustery commander, obsessed with the search for an open polar sea, and we experience the wild, disturbing beauties of that last unexplored region. In counterpoint to his views are those of the Esquimaux, witness to the expedition's exploits, and of the women left behind in Philadelphia, who can only imagine what lies beyond the north wind. Together, those who travel and those who stay weave a web of myth and history. In the real nineteenth-century expeditions, explorers' documents always cast the writer as hero. But what really happened up there, in the long winter darkness, trapped in ice?

FROM THE CRITICS

Peter Kurth

It's been a long time since an American novel appeared that's as stately and composed as Andrea Barrett's The Voyage of the Narwhal, the fictional account of a 19th century Arctic expedition and its aftermath that doubles also as a meditation on the nature of adventure and the scientific mind. As a writer, Barrett has long been concerned with the restless energies and interior conflicts that drive people to search for things not known before and, equally important, to capture what they find. In 1996, Barrett won the National Book Award for Ship Fever, a collection of shorter pieces on "the love of science and the science of love." In The Voyage of the Narwhal, she has shaped a compelling narrative around the golden age of Arctic exploration, written in the spirit, if not the length or the exact style, of a 19th century novel -- solid, unhurried, reflective and totally wedded to plot.

Barrett's story finds its impetus in one of the great enigmas of history, the disappearance of the British explorer Sir John Franklin and all of his crew on a voyage to discover the Northwest Passage. In the 1850s, the case was an international cause célèbre, and the efforts to find Franklin and his party on subsequent excursions led to as many adventures and mishaps as originally befell Franklin. Newspapers and magazines went wild over the story. Franklin was a popular hero whose portrait hung in countless middle-class drawing rooms, and any man who managed to find him would have been assured of fame and glory. Against this factual backdrop, Barrett has created Erasmus Darwin Wells, a Philadelphia naturalist whose previous explorations around the world have ended in shame and discredit, and Erasmus' protégé Zechariah Vorhees, called "Zeke," who is engaged to Erasmus' sister and who leads the Narwhal on a quest for Franklin through the Arctic. Zeke's goal, as Erasmus discovers to his cost, is not just to find the Franklin party but to be the Man Who Did.

Erasmus has his own kind of glory in mind -- "northern sights to parallel," "discoveries in natural history that might prove extraordinarily important" -- but ego wins out in all directions.On the adventurers' return, the truth about what happened on the Narwhal is the first and lasting casualty.

"Why is it so difficult to capture what was there?" Erasmus wonders. "I wish I could show it as through a fan of eyes. Widening out from my single perspective to several viewpoints, then many, so the whole picture might appear and not just my version of it. As if I weren't there." Barrett tells her story through multiple voices -- Erasmus, Zeke, their colleagues, the crew and the women waiting patiently at home -- but Voyage of the Narwhal is her own creation, marvelously imagined and beautifully told. A first-rate novel and a welcome, old-fashioned read. -- Salon

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Breathtaking. . . Andrea Barrett shows nearly total mastery of the craft of fiction. This beautiful book -- exquisetely written in every way -- is fully worthy of the massive, dangerous subject it undertakes.

Annette Kobak - New York Times Book Review

Entirely through plot and character. . .the author shows how redemption is possible. . . .It takes Erasmus' voyage on the Narwhal. . .to lead him painfully to a more valuable inner voyage of discovery, and it's only toward the end that he begins to understand something of his own heart.

Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times

Does. . .Ms. Barrett succeed in fulfilling her own large ambitions? . . .up to a point. . . .Only in the novel's final pages does drama give way to melodramatic contrivance. . . . fluent plotting gives way to increasingly contrived events. . .these events. . .do not tarnish Ms. Barrett's very real achievements . . .

John Skow

. . .[A] powerful, brooding movel. . .moves like an advancing ice age. —Time Magazine Read all 17 "From The Critics" >

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