Scott's Last Biscuit

Sarah Moss has written a compelling account of the hold which polar exploration has had over the imagination. She gives vignettes of a number of different expeditions, and, whilst most of these date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, her historical range takes us back to the fourteenth century, and forward to the ecological challenges of our own time. What interests her in particular is what it means to write, and to read, of polar exploration: what it means for writing to become a psychological necessity against a void - and why people should wish to read of men struggling to express themselves under desperate circumstances. She has a particularly keen eye for the telling detail, and understands the importance of strong narratives: in other words, she gives a very vivid picture of what life was like in a polar ship or in a tent, or trekking across frozen wastes: we know what it. This is a book about claustrophobia and intolerance; about the strains that are put on personal relationships; about filling empty time; about finding reassurance, comfort and pleasure in grim surroundings. It is, above all, a book which examines ideals of masculinity, as they were formed in the nineteenth century, and as we see them come under almost unbearable stress. The triumph of Sarah Moss's book is that it returns our attention to the physical and mental experience of attempting to reach the poles. Rather than being absorbed by the aesthetic, this is a book about humans under extreme conditions, and is extremely revelatory not just about their individualized responses - ranging from stoic cheerfulness to selfishness, derangement, and despair - but about the way in which these responses are revelatory of the cultures which formed them. The book is a vivid study of what it is to be very, very cold - and to see one's companions, and potentially oneself, die as a result of exposure to some of the world's most uninhabitable terrain. It is an examination of those who both seek, and who seek to express, forms of suffering which they have voluntarily chosen for themselves. - Kate Flint, Rutgers University