Death on the Ice – Robert Ryan
You know how it is when someone gives you a book for a present (in this case Christmas), but the person themselves is someone you don’t share any reading with? You wonder whether their choice will suit? I’m so fussy (in most things actually) that buying anything for me is a risky business. Mrs G rarely buys me clothes for that reason and I’ve long ago asked mother and sister not to either.
Well Mrs G’s mum bought me two books for Christmas by the same author, this fellow Robert Ryan, who it turns out, takes history and turns it into novels, such as the Great Train Robbery, Lawrence of Arabia and the like.
The first I read, Empire of Sand, loosely based on the life of TE Lawrence, was OK, but not much better than that. But I’ve just finished Death on the Ice, a story of Robert Falcon Scott’s two Antarctic Expeditions, and found myself thinking about it when I wasn’t reading, wanting to get back to it to find out more.
As it nearer the grim and inevitable end that we all know something of I was happy to sacrifice the company of friends to plough through the final stages of the disastrous journey. The descriptions of the pain, or the rotting of flesh on loving men, and the culmination of so many little things going wrong was truly awful and no man could read it without feeling a deep chill and dread.
I’ve never been drawn to the extremes of temperature at either end of the scale. So to contemplate man hauling sleds through minus 40 or worse, with no food, ancient kit, no hope of warmth. It makes me shiver even now.
It’s not a brilliant read, but it was good and educational and I liked it for that.