Some aspects of the book are more successful than others. The examination of ancient writings which mention Thule - from Greece, Egypt, Rome - stimulate interest and curiosity successfully, but Kavenna’s clunking prose, especially when deployed in describing rundown areas of Baltic states or in attempting to capture the magnificence of snow and ice scenes, can be wearing – she is over fond of long list descriptions and comma splices which ruin the effect of her sometimes startling imagery. The dizzying leaps from country to country are also wearing and at times lend the book an ‘if-this-is-Tuesday-we-must-be-in-Belgium’ feel.

And yet, and yet…Kavenna introduces us to a range of interesting characters encountered on her journeys, and some of these are fascinating. My own favourite was Gunvor, the woman born of a Norwegian mother and a Nazi soldier, an approved mating in the days of Nazi breeding for racial superiority. The products of these matings were appallingly treated by Norwegians after the war, and Gunvor’s lifelong sense of separateness and isolation are truly moving. Kavenna shows the link between what happened to Gunvor and Nazi obsession with tracing Aryan ‘history’ through the mists of time. Hitler and Himmler were influenced by a Thule Society which believed that the Aryan race originated in a Thule located in the snowy wastes of the far north. And that belief had its origins in Victorian Romanticism about Nature.

It is in these sorts of digressions that Kavenna excels. She follows the routes of both Victorian German and British tourists who flocked to commune with Nature on the glaciers and icescapes of the last unexplored areas of the world. Morris and Burton and many notables made the pilgrimage and recorded it in awed prose and poems. Kavenna also records her own awed impressions. The constant awe is tiring in the end, and it is a guilty relief to read the words of that not easily impressed poet W.H Auden in his satires on the excesses of Nature lovers communing mystically with ice and geysers.

Other interesting digressions are a trip to the Wittelsbach palace, a hilarious viewing of the Icelandic Volcano Show, and a warning note about the damage being done to the Arctic wastes. There is another sad note struck in the accounts of the changes which have afflicted old communities like the Inuits or the Laplanders as they are forced by politics and necessity into the 21st Century. The death of variety and ancient lifestyles and the spread of bleak modernity are clearly distressing to Kavenna.

All in all, this book is a ragbag of impressions and thoughts and histories and myths, some dull, some lively and interesting. The last words surely belong to Seneca, one of the ancient writers quoted by Kavenna in the introductory section of her book, in his play about Medea. The exploration of the world by such as Jason and the Argonauts removes mystery from the world and Seneca has Jason cry after Medea:

“Go on through the lofty spaces of high heaven and bear witness, where thou ridest, that there are no gods”

’ And by the end of the book, the myth of Ultima Thule has been debunked. That shimmering legend cannot survive the reality of tatty Latvian states or among the unemployed in former Soviet bloc countries. As Kavenna puts it:

“with knowledge of the world comes a terrible loneliness, as humans realise they are alone in the world, alone with their laws and their cracked civilisations.”

Marion Arnott lives in Paisley, Scotland. She was winner of the Phillip Good Memorial Prize For Women's Fiction 1998, CWA Short Dagger 2001 and shortlisted for CWA Short Dagger 2002. Work has appeared in Scottish Child, West Coast, Solander Magazine, Peninsula , QWF, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (Japan), Books Ireland, Northwords, Chapman, Crimewave, and Datlow and Winding's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 15. Her short story collection 'Sleepwalkers,' was published in August, 2003 by Elastic Press. To visit Marion's Showcase on this website, click here

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.