A major novel by the author of Ship Fever, winner of the 1996 National Book Award for Fiction. Part adventure narrative, part love story, this unforgettable novel captures a crucial moment in the history of exploration, the mid-nineteenth-century romance with the mystery of the Arctic. Combining fact and fiction, Andrea Barrett focuses on Erasmus Darwin Wells, a scholar-naturalist accompanying the expedition of the Narwhal. Through his eyes we meet the various crew members and the expedition's blustery commander, obsessed with the search for an open polar sea. And through his eyes we experience the wild, disturbing beauties of that last unexplored region. In counterpoint to his views are those of the Esquimaux, witness to the expedition's exploits, and of the women left behind in Philadelphia, who can only imagine what lies beyond the north wind. Together, those who travel and those who stay weave a web of myth and history. In the real nineteenth-century expeditions, explorers' documents always cast the writer as hero. But what really happened up there, in the long winter darkness, entrapped in ice? On the Narwhal, everyone is frightened, nothing is certain, and heroes emerge in unexpected guises. Barrett's explorers discover-as all explorers do-not what was always there and never needed discovering, but the state of their own souls.
Industry Reviews
"This novel takes off over the sea, straight out of history and into tragedy...We get to luxuriate in the promise of retribution and in finely calibrated, persuasive prose." -- The New Yorker
"[Andrea] Barrett's marvelous achievement is to have reimagined so graphically that cusp of time when Victorian certainty began to question whether it could encompass the world with its outward-bound enthusiasm alone-when it started to glimpse the dark ballast beneath the iceberg's dazzling tip." -- Annette Koback - New York Times
"A wonderful book in the truest sense of the word-wonder-filled" -- USA Today
"A luminous work of historical fiction that explores the far reaches of the Arctic and of men's souls...The novel is an excellent demonstration of Barrett's exceedingly fine and thorough hand at blending historical and natural detail with life-shaping conflict." -- Robin Vidimos - Denver Post
"Breathes with a contemporary urgency, an exhilarating adventure novel." -- Philip Graham - Chicago Tribune
"Breathtaking...exquisitely written in every way...fully worthy of the massive, dangerous subject it undertakes." -- Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Both cunningly cerebral and hair-raisingly visceral...This is an astonishingly good book by a writer we must declare as major." -- Newsday
"Stunning...Barrett shows the arrogance and delusion that drove the age of exploration better than any nonfiction book could." -- Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Times
"A meditation on the nature of adventure and the scientific mind...[W]ritten in the spirit...of a 19th century novel-solid, unhurried, reflective and totally wedded to plot...Voyage of the Narwhal is [Barrett's] own creation, marvelously imagined and beautifully told. A first-rate novel." -- Peter Kurth - Salon
"Barrett delivers a stunning novel in which a meticulous grasp of historical and natural detail, insight into character and pulse-pounding action are integrated into a dramatic adventure story with deep moral resonance...The denouement, when it arrives, is a triumph: a confluence of justice, retribution, spiritual faith, metamorphosis and love." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[An] impeccably researched and stunningly written tale...The intellectual range exhibited by this magnificent novel places its author in the rarefied company of great contemporary encyclopedic writers like Pynchon, Gaddis, and Harry Mulisch." -- Kirkus Reviews
