Book review: Dan Simmons' The Terror

photo: Jesse Butler

The topic of an earlier "mini-review" was two recent books by Dan Simmons: Drood and The Terror. I promised longer separate reviews for each work. This review is devoted entirely to the latter.

Aside from being spot-on historical fiction whose prose strikes exactly the right period timbre, Dan Simmon’s The Terror is a fine weird tale / supernatural horror novel. The book is doubly scary because the historical narrative that frames the supernatural horror of The Terror is frightening enough on its own. In 1845, Sir John Franklin, officer of the British Royal Navy, led a two-ship expedition (the other ship was captained by Francis Crozier) to the Canadian Arctic to find the elusive Northwest Passage.

 The story begins well before the actual sailing of HMS Erebus (captained by Franklin) and HMS Terror and various flashbacks during the ships’ voyage provide a pitch-perfect mid-nineteenth century setting for the action. And the place setting early in the novel makes for an even more wrenching read as things start to go wrong for the Franklin expedition. Before the ships sail, we are treated to parties for the celebrated Sir John. It’s all tea, cucumber sandwiches in mild and sunny English Summer in May of 1845 soon before Terror and Erebus are to set sail.

Crozier’s fretting about the late date of their departure sets up a bit of tension as we imagine the chilling scenes that are to come as we meander through the first hundred or so pages and learn a whole new nautical vocabulary and get a sense for the men who sail the ships. There’s not much time to waste even though Franklin plans on spending at least one winter stuck in the ice. He wants to get as far into the thick of the ice as he can in order to have a good starting point for the summer of 1846, when the ice breaks up and sailing can begin again.

The trouble is that summer never seems to arrive in 1846. HMS Terror and HMS Erebus remain stuck in the ice. And the chill the reader feels when he or she thinks of being stuck on ship on the icy fringes of the Arctic Ocean never lets up. The sailors face all manner of difficulties, from food poisoning brought on by improperly sealed canned food (a new invention in the 1840s) and the breakdown of the vitamin C that such food originally contained, to the occasional violence precipitated by squabbling and bickering that must be part of any time spent by men aboard a the same ship for over a year, to the fact that there’s something (an enormous and incredibly strong polar bear, perhaps?) with an evil disposition continually harassing the crew. In fact, the harassment is destructive and deadly. The crew gets smaller and smaller as conditions become harsher and the malevolent polar bear (?) continues to prey upon them.

Dan Simmons has incredible historical material to work with in The Terror. Not only is it the case that both ships were lost and that not one of the officers or crew of each was every heard from again, it’s still not entirely clear how or where the officers and crew died. Simmons can be consistent with the historic facts of the Franklin expedition and still tell a bone-chilling horror story because he can place it in a historical context: the only people who know exactly what happened were never heard from again. Who’s to say there wasn’t a massively baleful super-intelligent polar bear wreaking havoc on the ships and picking off the odd crew member? Since Simmons has this much freedom to create something truly creepy during the unknowable last years of Franklin’s arctic expedition, the reader can probably guess that there’s something quite a bit more frightening than an ordinary, run-of-the-mill giant polar bear responsible for the vanished crew members.

The whatever-it-is-that’s-beating-the-hell-out-of-the-ships-and-their-crews is a part of what Simmons presents as Inuit mythology / cosmology. Some, like New York Times reviewer Terrence Rafferty (in his review), have complained about what they perceive as needless complications and narrative flabbiness introduced by Simmons meditations on this purported folklore. I disagree with Rafferty. I think it all fits together nicely, and even though the book is over 750 pages, every detail is necessary for the story to fit together.

And I believe the story is a compelling one, and that the ending is appropriate, Inuit mythology and all. Over the course of the novel, Crozier becomes its protagonist. And as many of the other characters are meeting their ends in the last 200 pages, the reader likely has a special desire that Crozier doesn’t wind up in the Polar Bear’s (?) jaws or frozen to death in the middle of pack ice plateau. Simmons knows this, of course, and he’s set things up in manner that allows for a wildly unexpected fate for Crozier. After all, who now knows what really happened? The attractiveness of Simmons’ ending has even influenced the authors of the Wikipedia. Search ‘Francis Crozier’ and you’ll see that his date of death is given as ‘1848(?)’. He’s certainly dead now, one hundred fifty years later, but who’s to say that what Simmons narrates didn’t actually happen.

This particular genre is particularly appealing for those who like weird tales but are firmly grounded in a metaphysics-of-science worldview, and The Terror makes a brilliant first foray into it. In this regard, a comparison could be made between The Terror and the recent Spanish film The Orphanage, in which supernatural horror can be (and in the end is) explained in terms of psychological horror.

Fortunately, this is only Simmons first foray into the new genre he’s pioneering. His latest book, Drood, about the last five years of Charles Dickens’ life and the life during that time of Wilkie Collins and their mutual obsession with the personage of Drood, digs even deeper. In that work, all the details of the major events of both men’s lives are known and Simmons must place the weird tale / supernatural horror elements within the interstices carved out between what is documented about (and published by) the two figures. Look forward to a full length review of Drood appearing soon!