North With Franklin

Rating:
Summary: Woodman in fiction
Review: I did read with great interest John Wilson's novel. It beautifully summarises the findings of John Franklin historians among which the most recent and complete is probably David Woodman's "unravelling the Franklin Mystery".

Why only three stars? maybe because I had already read Woodman's books and Wilson adds little to that. Fiction it is, but sticks very closely to the conclusions to which previous authors arrive. The story puts together all the known clues but, at the end adds not much else.

My greed to learn more was frustrated for instance at how little is described of Peel-Lady Jane strait; this, after all, was the main discovery of the Franklin expedition. It seems difficult to believe that they would not be more excited about it!

Wilson desserves great credit for assembling into a consistent fiction the conclusions of others. I would have wished more colorful and dramatic extrapolations, as one can find for instance in Jules Vernes "les anglais au pole nord" from last century. I would have liked to live the north with Fitzjames.

Rating:
Summary: Woodman in fiction
Review: I did read with great interest John Wilson's novel. It beautifully summarises the findings of John Franklin historians among which the most recent and complete is probably David Woodman's "unravelling the Franklin Mystery".

Why only three stars? maybe because I had already read Woodman's books and Wilson adds little to that. Fiction it is, but sticks very closely to the conclusions to which previous authors arrive. The story puts together all the known clues but, at the end adds not much else.

My greed to learn more was frustrated for instance at how little is described of Peel-Lady Jane strait; this, after all, was the main discovery of the Franklin expedition. It seems difficult to believe that they would not be more excited about it!

Wilson desserves great credit for assembling into a consistent fiction the conclusions of others. I would have wished more colorful and dramatic extrapolations, as one can find for instance in Jules Vernes "les anglais au pole nord" from last century. I would have liked to live the north with Fitzjames.

Rating:
Summary: Into the Ice
Review: The Franklin Expedition has fascinated me for years, especially since some of my students created an interactive computer game, "The Mystery of Franklin's Fate," for Science World in Vancouver. I've even thought about writing a novel about it, but now John Wilson has saved me the work--and done a far better job than I could have!

North With Franklin is the journal of James Fitzjames, one of Franklin's captains (some of the early passages are from his real letters). Wilson has the style and attitude just right, and blends his research very effectively into the story. We can see the ships, the men, the terrain. We see the first optimism fade as the ships are trapped in the ice and make no progress in the short summers. The first deaths, from TB, are painfully vivid to Fitzjames; by the end, each death gets only a cursory note, while the captain battles his own mysterious ailments and tries to keep the survivors alive. His journal is a series of letters to his sister-in-law, for whom he clearly feels more than he can admit.

As the years pass and the expedition dwindles to a handful of desperately sick men, Captain Fitzjames comes at least to a clearer understanding of what has gone wrong--not just lead poisoning and scurvy, but a complacently arrogant belief in superior technology.

John Wilson brings the expedition members to life again, each a distinct character (though of course the "people"--ordinary seamen--are seen through the eyes of an officer in a class-ridden society).

The narrative seems so plausible that I half-expected to find the expedition's place-names on the endpaper maps--but whatever names they gave the bays and points vanished with them and their records.

Still, North With Franklin is as close an account of the expedition's fate as we are likely to have, at least until Captain Fitzjames's real journals are found under some Arctic cairn.

Rating:
Summary: Into the Ice
Review: The Franklin Expedition has fascinated me for years, especially since some of my students created an interactive computer game, "The Mystery of Franklin's Fate," for Science World in Vancouver. I've even thought about writing a novel about it, but now John Wilson has saved me the work--and done a far better job than I could have!

North With Franklin is the journal of James Fitzjames, one of Franklin's captains (some of the early passages are from his real letters). Wilson has the style and attitude just right, and blends his research very effectively into the story. We can see the ships, the men, the terrain. We see the first optimism fade as the ships are trapped in the ice and make no progress in the short summers. The first deaths, from TB, are painfully vivid to Fitzjames; by the end, each death gets only a cursory note, while the captain battles his own mysterious ailments and tries to keep the survivors alive. His journal is a series of letters to his sister-in-law, for whom he clearly feels more than he can admit.

As the years pass and the expedition dwindles to a handful of desperately sick men, Captain Fitzjames comes at least to a clearer understanding of what has gone wrong--not just lead poisoning and scurvy, but a complacently arrogant belief in superior technology.

John Wilson brings the expedition members to life again, each a distinct character (though of course the "people"--ordinary seamen--are seen through the eyes of an officer in a class-ridden society).

The narrative seems so plausible that I half-expected to find the expedition's place-names on the endpaper maps--but whatever names they gave the bays and points vanished with them and their records.

Still, North With Franklin is as close an account of the expedition's fate as we are likely to have, at least until Captain Fitzjames's real journals are found under some Arctic cairn.