Michael's Reviews > The Terror

Why am I reading so many books about the cold? Maybe because it's freezing here in Chicago!

This is a buddy read with Cristina, and I'll review as I go.

The first couple of hundred pages were surprisingly slow-going. There was very little propulsion about the plot--just occasional glimpses of the "terror" along with long passages of backstory that I didn't really find compelling. I don't know why I reacted like that. Maybe it was because I'd just read Crime and Punishment, another (and very different) tome that managed to be fascinating throughout. Or maybe it was the prose, which isn't terribly stylish. I'm always a sucker for great prose, and I miss it when it isn't there. At that point, I would have given the book two or maybe three stars.

Then, at some point, things brightened up--the plot started shifting into gear, with all the various elements (the terror, the ice, scurvy, boredom, and inter-character conflict) starting to come together. I still think it took too long for that to happen, but boy, I'm glad it did!

[Some spoilers follow]

***

I love the scene of the Carnival, no doubt because it self-consciously replicates Poe's The Masque of the Red Death. You just knew, given that setup, that the creature would strike, but it was quite well-done all the same. And the scene where Irving watches the creature and Lady Silence together was just magical. It deepened the sense of the creature as not merely being a source of terror, but also perhaps something more.

Of course, against the backdrop of the creature striking, we have the "ticking clock" in the form of scurvy and running out of food. The sailors need to do something to escape, and their ice-bound ships will not suffice. What can they do? It's a terrific source of tension.

***

In the end they make an ill-fated attempt to cross the ice by foot, and here is where the interpersonal tensions come to a head. It's also where we see, in shocking terms, just what the cold does to a human body. The creature recedes somewhat into the background as the elements take over. I may have wished for more of a confrontation with the creature, as it seems to emerge at times conveniently, only to fade away when its presence is inconvenient, but this is a minor quibble.

In the end, the group splinters, and a new source of evil in the form of Cornelius Hickey comes to the front of the stage. The pages here are quite gripping, even as the moral valence isn't terribly complicated.

What does become complicated, and what ultimately elevates this book, is the relationship between Captain Crozier and "Lady Silence" that emerges after Crozier is left for dead by Hickey and his band. What's interesting is how Crozier changes and becomes like an Eskimo himself--how he becomes a different person. The climax is when the creature emerges and cuts out his tongue just as it had Lady Silence's, and while this is never really explained, I took it as a metaphor for the limits of language itself--how they had to free themselves from language to see beyond its obscuring haze of words. In the end, much of the final part of the book is interwoven with songs and language taken from the Eskimo, and while I couldn't understand it, it nonetheless had a certain power. Like a Latin Mass, the sounds themselves conveyed a certain meaning beyond the rational, which may have been part of the point--that all that British rationalism only got the men killed, while the liturgical melding of Crozier and Lady Silence and the landscape itself was what saved him.