The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule by Joanna Kavenna (Viking Press, hardback, $24.95)

Thule, like Atlantis or Shangri-la, is one of those mythic place names that fires human imagination by its mere sound alone. It was first mentioned by the Greek explorer Pytheas in the fourth century B.C., who described a place set in a frozen sea where the sun disappeared into the waters and the land was plunged into darkness all winter long. No one has ever been able to find out exactly what he was talking about, and, given that in the past explorers and writers recognized an elastic distinction between fact and myth, there remains a very distinct possibility that Thule can only be found by use of poetic license. Nonetheless, the image of Thule has persisted, its pure, blank frozen whiteness becoming a tabula rasa for men’s ideas about nature and elemental human society, and The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule by Joanna Kavenna addresses both the objective possibility of an actual, historical Thule and the subjective visions that have been projected on it’s vast nothingness.

I’ll admit I was resistant to this book at first – I guess I expected a more scholarly, weighty approach, rather than Kavenna’s very personal picaresque – but she won me over quickly with her elegant, lyric prose, her disarming, understated persona, and her expert blending of travel narrative and history of ideas, literature and exploration. She begins by visiting all the places that have been considered possible locations of Thule, the Shetland Islands, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, advancing northward, capturing what she sees as she smoothly explicates what other travelers have said about those places as Thule, and also examining the turbulent history of Arctic exploration at large.

To me, the strongest section of the book is when Kavenna grapples with the most hateful mannifestation of the Thule ideal – its expropriation by the Nazis as pristine mythico-historical homeland where snow white Aryan purity reigned. The Thule Society was one of many esoteric/political organizations that flourished in Europe, and one of the handful that served as an early focus and gathering place for what was to become the Nazi party. As I’ve said in my Knut Hamsun piece (http://radiofreeubu.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!20644E2D1DEF7917!1283.entry)

this confluence of modernist and fascist elements is as troubling as it is seemingly inevitable, and Kavenna approaches this treacherous territory with the proper measure of fascination and abhorrence.

Is the fascist horror an obvious result of romantic, anti-bourgeois ideas? Certainly it’s in a lot of people’s interest to have you think so, and it’s quite a pervasive, reflexively echoed theme in our current mainstream culture which is in many ways deeply conservative and anti-romantic. In the 9/18 issue of The New Yorker one Ian Buruma, Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard college casually writes of Gunter Grass: "But there is an element of contempt here – toward commercial culture and capitalism – that hints at some of Grass’s earlier [i.e. when he was a member of the Waffen-S.S] attitudes," as if contempt toward materialism is a form of incorrect thinking that inexorable leads to anti-democratic movements. To my mind it’s not that simple – just as the Nazi swastika was oriented in an opposite, sinister way to the traditional rune of India, their ideas were a sinister distortion of the modernist and esoteric conceptions of the time. The idea of "racial purity" is patently absurd and manifestly evil, but it remains a powerful lure to the psychically unsettled, as evidenced in the sudden Republican alarm on immigration and the hysterical ravings of dreadful demagogue mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh. The racial preoccupation alone was enough to poison the well of Nazi ideology, but it does not reflect on the profound, transcendent springs of German romanticism on which it fed.

Although Kavenna is very astute in her explication of Knut Hamsun’s big botch, his championing of the Germans, her brief precis of his work is the one place where I found The Ice Museum demonstrably off the mark:

It’s hard to believe that Kavenna is old enough to have actually read the books and then forgotten so much about them. Anyone who has looked at Pan, the book she references, knows that it was in fact an early work and that its protagonist/narrator Lieutenant Glahn is no child of the land but, obviously an ex-army officer, which indicates social status, an extremely educated and articulate gentleman who chooses to live in a hut out of love of nature and a rejection of human society. And to say he shoots himself in the foot because Edvarda won’t talk to him is criminal reductionism. Even August the old wandering protagonist of several of Hamsun’s later works, although he does work odd jobs and pine over various beautiful daughters, is not an inarticulate brute, but an drop out from civilization, intent on living a life without ambition. There are a few books like Growth of the Soil which revolve around plain folk without the addition of a neurotic dreamer but they are very few, and Hamsun never loses the complexity of his vision.

I only wish she had at least glanced at Hamsun before she wrote those words, but the "brute’ idea fits so neatly with her arguments about the lure of fascism that she no doubt wanted it to be true. The other sad thing is that so few people are familiar with Hamsun that no editor called her on it before publication and so few people will know that it is utter bunk.

BUT otherwise I enjoyed the book. I worried as I neared the end because, like most picaresques, there’s no natural ending that isn’t an anti-climax. Unlike William Broad’s The Oracle, Kavenna isn’t going to "solve the mystery." But she accomplishes closure elegantly, describing her visit to the island of Svalbard, a place nobody thought was Thule, but which is icy and cold enough to be truly Thulean. Here she finds scientists charting the climate changes which have already meant great changes to the arctic regions and may yet be the end of Thule, if not all of mankind. Of all the myriad mistakes George Bush has made, it’s possible his deriding and denying of global warming may yet prove to be the most egregious, although, god knows there’s no lack of stiff competition. (Maybe the American electorate will think twice about electing another ignorant, immature and inexperienced boob to such high office – but I doubt it).

As the above digressions show, Kavenna is able to give a provocative depth to her breezy travel narrative, and I highly recommend it as an entertaining, informative read – perfect for the coming winter.