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Summary
Summary
Flora Mackie first crossed the Arctic Circle at the age of twelve. In 1889, the whaler's daughter from Dundee - dubbed by the press "The Snow Queen" - sets out to become a scientist and explorer. She struggles to be taken seriously but determination and chance lead her back to northern Greenland at the head of a British expedition, despite the many who believe that a young woman has no place in this harsh world of men. Geologist Jakob de Beyn was raised in Manhattan. Yearning for wider horizons, he joins a rival expedition, led by the furiously driven Lester Armitage. When Jakob and Flora's paths cross, it is a fateful meeting. All three become obsessed with the north, a place where violent extremes exist side by side: perpetual night and endless day; frozen seas and coastal meadows; heroism and lies. Armitage's ruthless desire to be the true leader of polar discovery takes him and his men on a mission whose tragic outcome will reverberate for years to come. Set against the stark, timeless beauty of northern Greenland, and fin-de-siecle New York and London, Under a Pole Star is a compelling look at the dark side of the 'golden age' of exploration, a study of the corrosive power of ambition, and an epic, incendiary love story. It shows that sometimes you have to travel to the furthest edge of the world in order to find your true place in it.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This rich, thoroughly satisfying historical tale from Penney (The Invisible Ones) binds together adventure, passion, and love. The story opens with a frame sequence in 1948, as the elderly Flora Cochrane and young Randall Crane are set to fly to the North Pole as part of an American expedition. Randall is fascinated by Flora, so she recounts for him the Arctic explorations that she led a half-century before, a tale that makes up the bulk of the novel. It is on that earlier expedition that she met American geologist Jakob De Beyn, and a spark was struck between them. Though the two parted ways after the expedition, they carried a flame for each other despite living on opposite sides of the Atlantic and Flora's marriage to another man. Penney's prose is rapturous, whether she is describing the "overwhelmingly rich-glorious and unnecessary" landscape, or in her detailed and richly imagined passages on the attraction and intimacy between Flora and Jakob. By telling their story through recollection and the letters that they send, Penney imparts an additional layer of suspense, with neither the reader nor the characters knowing what may come, resulting in an exciting and transportive novel. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
The mysterious disappearance of her fellow explorers haunts a former pioneer in this dazzling tale of romance and survival Unforgiving landscapes have served Stef Penney well: she first depicted them to heart-catching effect in her Costa-winning debut The Tenderness of Wolves, a historical adventure of abduction and quest, cultural assimilation and domination set in the Canadian wilderness. A meticulously researched drama set among British Gypsies, The Invisible Ones, followed. In the stately, glittering iceberg that is Under a Pole Star she returns to the north with a tale of foul play and doomed love. In 1948 the elderly explorer Flora Mackie, once dubbed the Snow Queen, is heading for the Arctic Circle on a publicity stunt. En route, a journalist questions the former pioneer about two of her contemporaries, Lester Armitage and Jakob de Beyn, who went missing in the frozen wastes under mysterious circumstances. Is the "unreadable" old lady harbouring a dark secret? Its framing device established, the story proceeds through a drip feed of flashbacks starting with Flora's childhood voyages with her whaleboat-captain father to Greenland, where she made lifelong friendships with the local Inuit and learned their language. Later, in London, she studied meteorology with a view to returning to her beloved north. In a parallel New York narrative, her future lover, Jakob de Beyn, has pinned his hopes on the same set of stars -- which ominously include what the Inuit call "Sikuliaqsiujuittuq ", The Murdered Man. To Arctic pioneers, any land mass whose outermost edges dissolved into white nothingness cried out to be charted, named and claimed. Their expeditions involved frostbite, drowning, mass starvation and rumours of cannibalism, with Inuit lives part of colonial ambition's collateral damage. Penney conveys with particular poignancy Armitage's cavalier treatment of local tribespeople flattered into appearing as live museum displays in the US -- with tragic consequences. As a woman in a male-dominated world, coming of age in the late 19th century, Flora must hitch her sledge to men -- first her father, and then the syphilitic suitor who offers "not so much a declaration of love, as a prospectus". "This is what so much of leadership boils down to: the tedious juggling of conflicting egos," she observes of one Arctic mission. Much of the novel's dramatic strength lies in such conflict, but so, paradoxically, does its central weakness. Flora's admirable battles with the patriarchy keep her so logistically active that, while her personal ambitions within the wider political landscape are well drawn, her inner life takes a back seat. For much of the book, she remains an enigmatic figure who is deftly etched rather than deeply engraved. It is in the masterfully evoked Arctic landscape and in her depictions of sex that Penney finds her dazzling stride If Penney's diligent research emphasises the story's backdrop at the expense of its emotional core, it is in the masterfully evoked Arctic landscape and in her depictions of sex that she finds her true, dazzling stride. With the same precision, inspiration and grace that characterised The Tenderness of Wolves, Penney describes the noise of pack ice as resembling whining puppies, swarming bees, a groaning whale. "Or it was insensate and violent: cloth ripping, artillery fire, a grand piano falling from a second-storey window." An iceberg is "scored with clefts that glowed deep blue above and at its water-worn foot, a pale, silky green. A ruined masterpiece from a vanished civilisation." The sex scenes are equally lush. A blizzard of setbacks bundles Flora and Jakob's rapturous, illicit romance in so many layers of sturdy protective clothing that by the time they're skin-to-skin halfway through the book the pace has slowed, but their physical intoxication is triumphantly worth the wait. Penney never resorts to the cowardice of the blank space followed by the paragraph that coyly begins "Afterwards". In applying the same forensic scrutiny and sensuality to a clitoris as she does to an icescape, she ensures that her erotic passages are emotionally engaging and psychologically plausible as well as exquisitely detailed. Consummation accomplished, Penney refuses to make it easy for her lovers -- or, indeed, her readers. With happily-ever-after within her grasp, Flora develops a baffling rash of scruples, while Jakob, hobbled by unappealing self-esteem issues, writes her stilted letters that censor his true feelings. These lovers really are inviting the stars to cross them. Given this frustrating turn of events, it is a tribute to Penney's superlative descriptive skills that the book's erotic charge is so startlingly effective, and that her icy landscapes cast such a lasting, almost hallucinatory spell. This combination is the true rocket fuel of Under a Pole Star, and what makes it resonate long after the Snow Queen has divulged her long-held secret. - Liz Jensen.
Kirkus Review
A woman attempts to throw off Victorian convention as an explorerand a lover.Flora Mackie's upbringing is unconventional, to say the least; after her mother dies when she's 12, her father, a whaling captain, brings his daughter on his travels toward the North Pole, where she learns the way of ships and navigation by stars. It's no wonder that when she chooses to study meteorology at university she does so with an eye to returning north to pursue her own goals at the earliest opportunity. Temporarily distracted by a tempestuous romance with a fellow student, however, it soon seems that Flora's desire to be a scientist and explorer will always war with affairs of the heart and the body. Indeed, for most of the novel, Flora's travels and studies seem to rank secondary to the desires of her body, and as she is schooled in the art of sex and the complications of love by her husband and lovers, there are a lot of graphic sex scenes. And herein lies the problem with Penney's (The Invisible Ones, 2012, etc.) novel: while there's no reason that Flora, as a multidimensional woman, shouldn't have a flourishing and liberated personal life, this side of the plot quickly overshadows the unique and beautiful side that describes her experiences in the exotic north. Then again, there are some lovely moments of prose, such as, "To winter's home; the whiteness that is always there, falling with infinite slowness, infinite patience, into the sea." The descriptions of the ice, of the endless nights and days that characterize the north, are beautiful; if only they hadn't been just backdrops to assignation after assignation. For a novel about "blackmail, lies, murder," it's rather light on the intrigue and heavy on the petting. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Exhilarating in its scope and imagery, Penney's third novel, after The Invisible Ones (2012), conjures the adventurous spirit of the late nineteenth century, when the remote frozen North compelled the daring and ambitious. Flora Mackie, a Dundee whaling-captain's daughter, spends much of her adolescence above the Arctic Circle, via her father's ship, and feels most comfortable there. Her tale unfolds alongside that of Jakob de Beyn, who comes of age in fin de siècle New York. When they first meet, in northwestern Greenland in 1892, she's a serious-minded meteorologist leading a British expedition, while he has joined a rival American party as a geologist. Their unspoken attraction later blooms into a complicated love affair, relayed with candid intimacy. Competition for new discoveries leads to heightened tensions, and a mystery emerges after a tragedy occurs and suspicions of deceit arise. Serious issues like gender bias and exploitation are adeptly handled, and the icy Arctic setting comes alive in passages of shimmering beauty. Penney conveys both the elation and fear evoked when crossing into unfamiliar territory, be it geographical or emotional. She also delves into the customs and beliefs of the Inuit, whose generous hospitality to the Westerners is indispensable. An exceptional epic about an unconventional woman's life and loves.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
It's 1948, and for the first time, explorers will stand on the North Pole. Among those on the flight is an elderly British woman once called the Snow Queen. Flora first crossed the Arctic Circle at age 12, when her newly widowed father took her with him on his annual whaling voyage. The rough conditions and the freezing cold might have deterred a weaker woman, but Flora was enthralled; growing up, she heads to university, determined to return to northern Greenland as an explorer. When her first romance fails and her lover, American geologist Jakob de Beyn, leaves the Arctic for a more conventional life, Flora marries a fellow explorer who is crippled in a terrible accident. Unwilling to stay at home and be his nursemaid, the unconventional Flora becomes one of the first truly modern women, leading her own team north, writing about her discoveries, and not marrying. Penney does a masterly job of melding Flora's story with the more factual accounts of polar expeditions, and many of her characters are taken from the pages of history. VERDICT Penney's third novel (after The Tenderness of Wolves; The Invisible Ones) is a gripping tale about the men and women who were driven to conquer the Arctic. Bound to appeal to admirers of Eowyn Ivey's To the Bright Edge of the World.-Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage P.L., AK © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
