The oldest fear of all
Painfully aware of his humble origins, the physicist turned-office-clerk is at first intimidated — and later enamoured — by expedition leader Gus, an amateur biologist with the square jaw and clear blue eyes of a Boy’s Own hero.
Together with rotund dog-driver Algie, Jack and Gus travel to Spitsbergen, a desolate part of Norway’s Svalbard Islands and a blank space on their map where ‘bad things’ are said to have occurred. Their arrival here, and the wariness of the sailors accompanying them, provides an atmospheric introduction to the strangeness which affects people when they overwinter in a place like this, a land where the ice sounds like it’s talking to itself and where night seems to last forever.
