An icy delight

Antarctic's cold, hard truths warmed by lust for language

By: Reviewed by Matt TenBruggencate Posted: 4:00 AM CDT Saturday, Apr. 2, 2016

Crossing frigid landscapes both at the bottom of the world and inside her mind, Canadian-born, London-based Jean McNeil offers a memoir that’s both as clear and layered with mystique as the ice it’s fascinated with. Rigorously self-critical and intelligent, The Ice Diaries somehow combines an exclusive tour of climatology’s biggest open-air laboratory with a personal journey that’s grounded in raw, authentic vulnerability.

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/04/2016 (3771 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 2006, McNeil joined the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) as a writer-in-residence, part of a larger push to equip artists as advocates for climate research and climate-change action. This memoir completes a trilogy of work to come from McNeil’s polar trips, joining her 2009 novel The Ice Lovers and 2011’s Night Orders: Poems from Antarctica and the Arctic in trying to pull readers’ hearts and imaginations to the out-of-sight front lines of climate change.

The physical descriptions alone are worth joining her on the journey, as she grinds slowly by boat towards one of the most inaccessible corners of our world. We may be tired of winter at this point in the year, but McNeil recasts ice and cold in new, shifting lights, drawing out the beauty and threat of the south’s unforgiving seas.

Finally arriving on a continent wholly devoted to science, McNeil finds herself treated as a distrusted voyeur. Scientists apparently don’t take well to the imprecision of fiction or her thesis that lies can help us find truths. Even as the BAS team help “the writer” (as they call her) climb a steep scientific learning curve to peer into the past and future of Earth’s ice, all but a few keep a chilly distance.

The result is a self-guided experiment in isolation — something every Antarctic visitor faces to a certain degree, but that appeals to McNeil’s natural bent for melancholy. The Antarctic summer also tugs back frozen memories of the last time McNeil was cold, growing up on Canada’s East Coast with her neglectful, traumatized family. As the threat of winter lockdown creeps toward the adult and a murderer looms over her teenage reflections, McNeil has no choice but to confront existence’s essential questions.

There’s a long history of Antarctic literature McNeil deliberately draws on, including the diaries of Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundson and Robert Falcon Scott. Her initial hope of finding a more life-affirming bent than offered by the tales of early explorers succumbs to the crucible of Antarctic. It could be deeply depressing if it wasn’t so poetically true and so personally necessary — and, in the end, this is a story of survival.

That may sound like heady going, but the memoir smartly jumps from memory to musing to scientific observations to break up the introspective trials. Her precise deployment of unexpected, apt words (propellers “chawing” through the air, scientists “imported” to the poles) is a treat and points to a consistent warm thread through The Ice Diaries — a lust for language. Even at the bottom of a spiritual crevasse, McNeil’s powers of articulation delight and draw readers forward.

There are less intense reasons to pick up The Ice Diaries — as a travelogue of a rarely seen world, as a companion piece to environmental journalism — but its true heart is a call to self-reflection. Like the Antarctic, The Ice Diaries beckons readers to the terrifying possibilities of testing yourself and emerging transformed.