1 week Ago
It isn’t difficult to understand why writers are drawn to stories of isolated characters grappling with extreme circumstances. Jack London’s bibliography abounds with such narratives; James Dickey’s 1992 novel “To the White Sea” summons an elemental power at times, and Nora Lange’s 2024 “Us Fools” gets plenty of emotional heft from placing its central characters in a trailer in a remote Alaskan town. “The Last Whaler,” By Cynthia Reeves.
Regal House Publishing. $20.95 There’s a challenge to this literature of isolation as well, and it comes from the isolation of it all.
Pare the story down to a single character and you have something with the potential to become too taut. Include too many and the stresses of isolation aren’t as deeply felt. This tension is part of what makes “The Last Whaler,” by the Camden-based author Cynthia Reeves, so effective.
At the center of the novel is a married couple, Tor and Astrid, working in Svalbard in 1937. For much of the novel’s second half, the pair are stranded and must fend for themselves as winter approaches. But it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to call them alone during this period; plenty in their past leaves them thoroughly haunted.
The structure Reeves uses to tell this story creates tension by its very nature. While the events of 1937 and 1938 are recounted by both Tor and Astrid, Astrid’s narration is in the form of letters she’s writing as these events unfold. Tor’s narration, meanwhile, is from a decade later; that discrepancy is the reader’s first hint that this story will not be one with a happy ending.
There’s also the matter of who Astrid is addressing her letters to: Birk, the younger of the couple’s two children, whose death looms over their marriage. Grief isn’t the only source of tension in their marriage. The two have very different views of nature: Astrid is a botanist, happy to study the flora around her, while Tor works as a whaler and, at one point, engages in an ethical debate over the morality of his chosen profession and his frustration with new restrictions on whaling practices.
In the first half of “The Last Whaler,” before Tor and Astrid are stranded for the winter, their interactions with some of the other seasonal residents of Svalbard sparks tension. Things get especially fraught with Odd, another whaler, whose interactions with Astrid contain a combination of resentment and desire. It isn’t hard to imagine another version of this novel in which he becomes the primary threat to Astrid and Tor; instead, the adversaries they struggle with are more internal.
Had Tor and Astrid merely been stranded in a harsh landscape without the hope of rescue for months, that would have been nerve-wracking enough. Add to this, Astrid’s unexpected pregnancy, and what initially seems like relatively mild depression soon takes an unsettling turn. At times, Astrid’s own actions even surprise her as she writes about them: “There are those poison mushrooms I harvested and dried and hid from Pappa in a wooden box.
Who is this woman who so loved her little boy?” The way that much of “The Last Whaler” takes place as Europe (and the globe) slips into World War II adds another layer of tension. Gradually, Tor reveals more about his own actions in the years between his time on Svalbard with Astrid and the post-war timeline; he is haunted, by the war itself, by his interactions with his daughter Birgitta, and by his own guilt for not taking a more active role against fascism. Besides the harrowing emotional interactions throughout her book, Reeves also has a knack for summoning up some truly jarring imagery.
In the novel’s second half, Tor and Astrid’s efforts to stay alive involve a few unsettling descriptions of wounded wildlife, including several eye injuries. Even the food that they eat — including, in one memorable scene, pickled reindeer tongue — reminds both reader and characters of the violence required to prepare it. Late in the novel, Astrid observes, “The dead wish to be seen.
” It’s something of a mission statement for “The Last Whaler” itself; it also helps to explain the tension at the heart of this book. That may well be what the dead would like, but for the living, especially the living trying their best to keep going in a harsh world, that very memento mori can turn survival on its head. New York City resident Tobias Carroll is the author of four books, most recently the novel “Ex-Members.
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