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.

Jack, Gus and Algie know better. These are men of science who have theories to prove about Arctic flora and ice dynamics, along with meteorological observations to transmit daily to government forecasters. They claim to have come to “see the midnight sun and polar bears and seals sliding off icebergs into green water”, but in a way all three are trying to escape their lives and the prospect of war in Europe.

The group’s camp is troubled by a mysterious figure in a sheepskin coat. Always dripping wet, the sailors call it a Draug, the unquiet spirit of a drowned man who lurks in the shallow water, waiting to carry the unwary to their doom.

While Paver’s writing oozes menace, Dark Matter is not all gloom. In the first half especially, the author’s lifelong love of the Arctic inspires joyful descriptions of sledding and otherworldly scenes such as the fall of polar night: “We saw the sky turn bloody and inflamed as the sun struggled to rise. We saw a sliver of fire. An abortive dawn. The sun sank back, defeated”.

Yet the starkest landscape here is Jack’s unravelling mind. Stubbornly electing to remain behind after illness and injury force his teammates to head south, Jack is haunted as much by the fear of insanity as he is by the Spitsbergen entity. With only the company of the dogs and occasional peeks into Gus’s journal to keep him sane, the true horror is in watching him succumb to depression and claustrophobia.

Alone beneath the eerie northern lights, Jack’s sojourn builds to a devastating final encounter with the entity that is as shocking as it is inevitable. Yet Paver sidesteps the screams-and-slashes aspects of supernatural fiction in favour of an unsettling psychological study of loneliness in a land of extremes.

This is a wise choice insofar as it allows her to foreground Jack’s longing for Gus, the golden-haired toff whom he is so desperate to impress. As the Draug circles his cabin, Jack consoles himself with thoughts of a reunion with Gus, a love he knows is impossible.

Disquieting and poignant in equal measure, Paver’s novel reminds us that fear of the dark is the oldest fear of all. An ideal read for long winter evenings.

Picture: Michelle Paver (Jenny/Getty Images)