2024/044: All the White Spaces — Ally Wilkes

...my brothers would never see Antarctica. Never know a clear day on the South Atlantic, or the jewelled ice of the floes. Their dreams had come to nothing, but I was the last Morgan sibling, and I knew where I’d find them. I knew where I had to go. [p. 8]

Jonathan Morgan stows away on the Fortitude to join the (fictional) 1920 British Coats Land Expedition, bound for Antarctica. Morgan's elder brothers Rufus and Francis both died in the Great War, before they could join explorer James Randall's expedition: Jonathan is still young enough to believe in heroism and desperate to prove himself as much of a man as his brothers. He is helped by Harry Cooper, an old friend of the family, but is of course discovered, some days into the voyage south. Expedition leader James 'Australis' Randall decides to let him stay, and Jonathan (having proved his worth by saving a crew member from going overboard) shares the peril of the crew as disaster strikes and they're stranded on the ice, with the southern winter closing in. The men are whispering about ghosts, about half-heard familiar voices, about vivid hallucinations of the War. And Jonathan begins to believe that he's glimpsed the ghost of his brother Francis.

This is an alternate history: instead of Shackleton's heroic efforts to save the Endurance expedition, Wilkes gives us Randall, damaged and flawed, unwilling to admit that he could ever make the wrong call when it comes to polar exploration. All the White Spaces explores ideas of masculinity: Randall, bluff and tough; Tarlington, the expedition's scientist, a former conscientious objector who's ostracised by the rest of the crew; Harry Cooper, who continually behaves as though Jonathan is a girl disguised as a boy; and Jonathan himself, self-made into the man he always knew he was, desperate to belong to 'the place I’d won by the fire, in that circle of men'.

Wilkes writes beautifully of Antarctica's stark beauty ('Tiny cracks marbled the furthest ice, thin and dark as the veins on an old woman’s hand. Everything else was glittering, sharp—dead white.') and imbues the crackling aurora australis, flickering red and green overhead, with dread. The aurora seems to herald visitations by something that Jonathan calls 'the nightwatchman'; blizzards come out of nowhere; a previous, German, expedition has vanished without trace. If All the White Spaces was a simple horror novel, it would be an accomplished example of its kind. The interactions between Jonathan, Cooper, Tarlington and Randall add a dimension that I found compelling and fascinating. Looking forward to reading Wilkes' second novel, Where the Dead Wait, which seems to riff off the Franklin expedition...

"We’ve dropped down a ... hole in the cloth of the world. Been sucked into one of the white spaces on the map.”

Fulfils the ‘grieving characters’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge: Jonathan and Harry are grieving the Morgan brothers, Randall is grieving his son, many of the crew have lost friends and relations to the War.