The Broken Lands and The Terror: Two Novels about the Franklin Expedition

Winter seemed an appropriate time to buckle down to Robert Edric's The Broken Lands: A Novel of Arctic Disaster (1992; rpt. 2003) and Dan Simmons' The Terror (2007).  Both novels speculate about the still unsolved fate of the Franklin expedition, with some overlap that derives from their shared sources; in particular, Edric and Simmons agree that the men died at least in part from leadpoisoning and/or food poisoning. Genre-wise, however, the novels are quite different: The Broken Lands is a historical novel in the realist mode, while The Terror is historical Gothic (cf. Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor).  Unfortunately, neither novel proved particularly satisfying...

Told in the third person, The Broken Lands features sparse dialog and large quantities of exposition.  The narrative proceeds in linear fashion, from the ships' departure to the expedition's eventual fatal attempt to walk to safety; it opens and concludes with the Erebus' James Fitzjames , who provides the novel's dominant POV.  Atop the Fitzjames "loop" is a more ironic reversal: the contrast between the celebratory dinner that marks the expedition's departure (23) and the starvation that marks its end.  Not surprisingly, the novel focuses on the primal battle against both the elements and the crews' own bodies.  This is not a philosophical novel, and Edric spends little time meditating on the expedition's significance, historical, ideological, or otherwise--although Dr. Goodsir angrily exclaims, "What have we done but pitted our strength against the ice, barging and blasting our way into this miserable dead-end?" (293)  Goodsir's frustration permeates the narrative, as the characters find themselves faced with pointless orders and rapidly-decaying food.  Juxtaposed against the expedition's failure to thrive are the Eskimos, whose near-total indifference to the Europeans personifies nature's equal lack of concern; on the novel's penultimate page, one hunter studies Fitzjames and his companion, then "stare[s] with greater interest at the contents of the cabin all around them" (368).  The crew find themselves either actively repulsed by their surroundings or simply absorbed into them.  In this novel, the expedition constitutes not so much a heroic failure as a tragedy of pointlessness.

I've now read three of Edric's novels, and all of them are narrated in the same flat, affectless, rather stilted prose.  Here, Edric frequently strips emotion from the dialog and inserts it into description--e.g., "Crozier was the first to his feet.  'But surely navigable by us along a good deal of its length,' he said, masking his anger at the realization that his own opinion had not been sought in advance of Franklin announcing his decision" (60).  The characters are not well-differentiated by voice, and often seem interchangeable.  Franklin, in particular, is a cipher.  Much of the text aspires to a kind of documentary tone, largely free of figurative language or any other sort of rhetorical flourish (a rare exception occurs near the end, when Fitzjames studies some photographs in a series of anaphoristic, parallel sentences); while this approach has its benefits during the gorier scenes, like an early amputation or various descriptions of scurvy, it ultimately drains the narrative of urgency.  For a novel about impending death by cold and starvation, The Broken Lands is surprisingly free from tension.

By contrast, The Terror is decidedly overstuffed--and not just because it's over 760 pages long, perilously close to one of Stephen King's clunkier doorstops (think It).  Besides the usual run of ice, starvation, and scurvy, Simmons includes murder, cannibalism,  second sight, and Inuit folklore (including Sedna).  Written from multiple POVs, the narrative tracks the expedition's simultaneous struggles against Arctic cold and a very unpleasant carnivorous beastie, dubbed "the Terror" (to go along with The Terror), which turns out to be the primeval result of a battle between the gods.   This is very much imperial Gothic: the European explorer or colonizer, floundering about in unfamiliar lands with their own deep history, finds himself under siege by a supernatural Other whose behavior cannot be controlled by "normal" (Western, Christian, whatever) methods.  (Kipling's "The Mark of the Beast" is a famous example.)  In this case, both the Arctic and the Tuunbaq destroy those who want to appropriate the ice for their own purposes.  Simmons makes no attempt to conceal the political allegory involved:

The sixam ieua knew through their forward-thoughts that when the Tuunbaq's domain was finally invaded by the pale people--the kabloona--it would be the beginning of the End of Times.  Poisoned by the kabloonas' pale souls, the Tuunbaq would sicken and die.  The Real People would forget their ways and their language.  Their homes would be filled with drunkenness and despair.  Men would forget their kindness and beat their wives.  The inua of the children would become confused, and the Real People would lose their good dreams.  (710)

The Tuunbaq is thus a double-edged sword, but one which can be controlled by a chosen few who relinquish their tongues (literally) in order to worship it.  Those few are also gifted with second sight, which is not confined to the Inuit; the one officer who survives the novel does so by relinquishing his European identity (ultimately symbolized by his destruction of the remaining ship), marrying an Inuit, and giving up his tongue to the Tuunbaq, in a moment explicitly associated with that most conventionally Gothic religion, Roman Catholicism.  (In a sense, the officer's embrace of the Tuunbaq atones for his childhood anxiety about taking communion in a Catholic church.)  Cultural assimilation becomes the route to both physical and spiritual survival, healing the wounds left by European national and class prejudices. 

While Simmons' prose style is undeniably livelier than Edric's, salted with idiom and profanity, the book suffers from two key problems.  First, while I'm always anxious about suggesting that a novel might have profited from better editing...really, The Terror might have profited from better editing.  Several set-pieces--Crozier's hallucinations during DTs, an elaborate carnival sequence, one man's escape from the Tuunbaq--begin tautly, then slowly run out of steam as they continue for far too long.  At other times, Simmons repeats himself unnecessarily.  Overall, the story feels padded--and here's where our second problem arises.  The novel doesn't need the Tuunbaq.  Between the Arctic and the canned food, the men are already in terrible danger; the demon feels superfluous.   Nor, for some reason, is the Tuunbaq especially frightening, perhaps because it comes across as the love child of Harold, the yeti who hangs out in the Matterhorn Bobsleds, and Armus, the evil oil slick that did in Tasha Yar .  Although I can see what Simmons was attempting to do with the Tuunbaq, he never really justifies its presence as a plot element.  There's a much tighter narrative in here, screaming to be let out.