[.ca] I May be Some Time: Ice And The English Imagination (ISBN 0312220812)

From Amazon.com:
What on earth could inspire so many men--so many British men, in particular--to brave unimaginable cold, hunger, fear, and physical danger in the planet's most remote and forbidding locales? In the case of many polar explorers, writes Francis Spufford, it was a complicated amalgam--English notions of sportsmanship, heroism, and honor mixed with romantic notions of the sublime. In his I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, Spufford explores the British obsession with the world's coldest and bleakest climes, using their literary representation as his guide. Although his book gives some historical background about early polar explorations, Spufford concerns himself more with English perceptions of snow and ice than with the snow and ice itself. He considers the writing of Byron, Coleridge, Tennyson, Melville, Mary Shelley, and others, as well as that of the polar explorers themselves, expertly limning how coldness and its metaphors captured the imagination of a generation of Englishmen. Along the way Spufford examines exploration's often unsavory ideological bedfellows, including Victorian views about class, race, and empire.

Academic, obtuse writing style ruins an interesting thesis.:
If you are looking for a possible answer as to why Scott and Shackleton risked their lives to get to the South Pole, this is NOT the book. Written in the style of a very dry doctoral dissertation, I May Be Some Time clouds some interesting ideas with turgid prose, tortured sentence structure, and an air of academic snobbery.

Psychohistory of a famous disaster:
Fascinating exploration of how the romantic movement nurtured the creation of an ideal vision of arctic/antarctic ice that ultimately contributed to a sense that it was nobler to suffer than survive. I found the book a well-written survey of popular opinion and response to polar exploration in England that presents an interesting thought: the idea that the ultimate source of Scott's disaster in the Antarctic may not have been stupidity, ego, arrogance, or any of the character flaws with which Robert F. Scott has been charged so much as hopeless romanticism (a character flaw all its own, true enough, which may contain elements of All Of The Above).

Pretentious - moi?:
Relentlessly prolix, unbearably sententious, I found reading this book like climbing out a snowdrift - hard work! There are whole pages without a paragraph and my skipping techniques were tested to the utmost. What a pity - the history of polar exploration is a fascinating subject that deserves better treatment: perhaps Mr Spufford is trying too hard. Within the heaps of slush there are a few nuggets of, if not gold, then silver plate, but most are contained in the last chapter, which takes some getting to! All told, a classic Don't Buy.

I began to think then that things were getting a bit serious:
If you have come this far into the Antarctic you've already read Lansing, Mawson, Scott, Shack, Cherry-Garrard, and Lashly. So those trudging first person narratives that caught your attention have given over to the Huntford style management critic, you got that. And here with Spufford you arrive at the analytical pole. This is not a discussion of technique nor tactics but from the South Center you can look in all directions at religion, music, poetry, myth, media; and the very power of precedence to both push and pull men. Here is the geography that makes otherwise hard practical men simply and ultimately spiritual; the deserts frozen or not, hold horizons of nothing that fill mens' heads with everything. Beyond this is to dream and hallucinate; try a little Vollmann. Enjoy the ride. PS. The last chapter of this book is worth its price; 48 pages of the best in the language on Scott and his men. It will make you cry.

A disappointing read:
Spufford's book has plenty of ice, but not a great deal of imagination. He's a fair writer, and manages to touch on all the right themes, but the bulk of the book is a disteneded prelude to the paean to Scott.