Antarctica is the fifth largest continent, but it is home to almost nothing. Only emperor penguins can withstand its lack of animal and plant life and shrivelling temperatures full time. Everything else, including humans, must migrate or die. In its vacant extremity, the Antarctic presents a challenge to writing, the aesthetic equivalent of scaling Everest. According to the environmental historian Stephen J Pyne, writers tackling it must “develop a vocabulary equal to their environment”.
Ernest Shackleton set the bar high with South, the riveting story of his failed 1914-17 expedition on the Endurance. It may be 100 years old, but it recounts the serial disasters that befell the expedition in prose that is startlingly modern. Miraculously, not one of the men lost his life (although many dogs and penguins were not so fortunate).
For a long time, Antarctica had only men to kill. Women were barred from the continent, supposedly due to the medical threats of pregnancy and the difficulty of repatriation. Not until the mid-1990s were they allowed to overwinter on British bases. Unlike Sara Wheeler or Gabrielle Walker, who offer perceptive accounts in Terra Incognita and Antarctica, Jenny Diski met a wall of rejection when she tried to travel there as an official observer, and took a berth on a cruise ship instead. Her morbid, acidic travelogue, Skating to Antarctica, is a haunting exploration of her inner Antarctic, which reflects this outsider status – all most of us will ever be on this remote continent.
“It appears out of the fog and low clouds, like a white comet in the twilight.” Pyne opens his thrilling survey The Ice on this looming note. He obeys his own dictum to find a language worthy of the place in this narrative steeped in science and history and so commandingly written it is best read a few paragraphs at a time, to savour the cold voltage of his prose. Structured by the stratigraphy of the continent, with sections titled The Berg, The Sheet, The Glacier, The Ice’s vertiginous language voices the Antarctic’s Wagnerian grandeur and unpacks its image as a blank space to reveal its true character: a metaphor, an enigma.
New Zealander Bill Manhire is the undeclared poet laureate of the Antarctic. In Antarctic Field Notes, written after three weeks there, he sets the exploits of the heroic age against his own more modest enterprise of shadowing scientists. The heroes are rewritten in sly anecdotes – “Scott stares at the Christmas tree”; they write mordant diary entries – “the drudgery of courage”; or “dream of whortleberry jam”. Underwriting Manhire’s spare, alert poems is a tenderness, even a pity that these men should have been so unprotected.
The Antarctic is white in more ways than one. Within a literature that is almost entirely of one colour, an exception is Mojisola Adebayo. Inspired by the true story of Ellen Craft, an African American woman who dressed as a white man to escape slavery in 1848, Adebayo’s play Moj of the Antarctic imagines Craft travelling there to become the first black woman to set foot on the continent.
In her prologue, Adebayo observes that only a space divides “justice” and “just ice”. If the east Antarctic ice sheet melts, it will provoke a 60m rise in global sea levels. As Manhire says, “only action is tolerable”. Otherwise mere ice may yet impose a form of planetary justice on us all.
• Ice Diaries: An Antarctic Memoir by Jean McNeil is published by ECW. To order a copy for £14.07 (RRP £15.99), go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
