Worse, he had never known, and could not imagine. This is the worst moment of my life, he promised himself, counting everything to come. It would be a useful memory, he knew, if he survived. [loc. 2242]
Echoing some themes from recent polar reads... The Impetus is one of the many ships searching the Arctic, in 1850, for Sir John Franklin's lost expedition. Captain Myers is stubbornly determined to continue the search, though it's late in the year: 'matters as they stand do not quite suit his convenience, and must therefore change'. Lieutenant Morgan, the second-in-command, has a lightly-sketched (but possibly shady) history and a mutinous streak. Ashore in Greenland while a broken rudder is mended, he briefly becomes involved with Kitty, the sister of the local governor: some weeks later, he discovers that the chaplain, Mr Macdonald, has smuggled Kitty aboard the Intrepid. She is pregnant.
Over the course of that pregnancy, the Intrepid heads north, under sail and then trapped in the ice. There is heroism, and there is violence. The crew -- DeHaven the doctor, Cabot the cook, Petersen and Brooks and Banes -- become distinct individuals. Morgan's relationship with DeHaven (friends since childhood) is strained: his relationship with Kitty is cool and distant. James' prose is also cool, distant, formal. His dialogue is unpunctuated, which made me pay more attention to distinguishing it from the surrounding prose:
I heard about your passenger, Austin said...
I think everybody has by now.
Unfortunate.
For me or for her? Morgan said.
For you both, I presume. Inconvenient too.
That's one way of putting it.
I found Morgan absolutely fascinating, perhaps because his past is so indistinct. One has a sense of scandal, of melancholy, of a man always in search of a fresh start. Hidden in The Surfacing amid the ice and the masculine environment and the beautiful terror of the high Arctic, between the moments of peril and the days of boredom, there's the story of Morgan's redemption, of his re-engagement with the world. A slow, quiet novel, in which actual events take second place to the characters', and especially Morgan's, inner lives.
One aspect of the story that seems strange to me is Kitty's, and Morgan's, confidence: they never seem to consider Kitty to be in danger (and especially sexual danger) from the crew. Does her social status make her invulnerable, or is it her pregnancy?
I bought this in August 2015, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.
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