Title: Dark Matter
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2
“How odd, that light should prevent one from seeing.”
Book Description:
January 1937. Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound
London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely, and desperate to change his
life, so when he's offered the chance to join an Arctic expedition, he jumps at
it. Spirits are high as the ship leaves Norway: five men and eight huskies,
crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach
the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year, Gruhuken,
but the Arctic summer is brief.
As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels
a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave. He faces a
stark choice: stay or go. Soon he will see the last of the sun, as the polar
night engulfs the camp in months of darkness. Soon he will reach the point of
no return--when the sea will freeze, making escape impossible. Gruhuken is not
uninhabited. Jack is not alone. Something walks there in the dark...
My musings:
I’ve been in the mood for a good ghost story for a while,
and when another book blogger told me that Michelle Paver’s novel Dark Matter
was not only suspenseful and spooky, but also set in a wild remote place, I
didn’t need any more persuasion! And I must say that it lived up to all my
expectations.
Dark Matter features an Arctic expedition in 1937, when four
young men set off in a Norwegian vessel to spend a year on the remote land spit
of Gruhuken on the Barents Sea. For twenty-eight year old Jack, who narrates
the story through journey entries, his role as wireless operator on the
expedition is a way to prove himself and escape his drab job as clerk that has
kept him afloat after his family was bankrupted, ending his hopes of finishing
his university degree. After his family’s fall from grace, Jack has turned into
a loner who has no friends and rarely associates with other people, keeping
himself to himself. Gruhuken, in its remoteness, has a strange appeal to him, a
way to make a new start, clean his slate. Both his background as well as his
personality make Jack an interesting, rounded character whose voice is perfect
for the era and drive much of story’s momentum as his initial reserve and
preconceived ideas begin to crumble in the remoteness of the Arctic Circle.
Paver does an excellent job in evoking the spirit of the
wild setting she describes so vividly. The initial beauty of the Arctic summer
with its constant daylight, which makes the men optimistic and confident about
their mission, feeling invincible even in the wild, remote region they feel
themselves stranded in. As the seasons change, and the days become shorter,
there is an obvious change in the men, their confidence eroded by the ever
increasing darkness and the eerie silence of the surrounding land when all the
birds have fled before winter. As daylight gives way to constant darkness, Paver
creates an atmosphere so tense and claustrophobic that I could literally feel
the cold creeping in through the cracks in the wall, grateful of my own bedside
lamp that kept the night at bay whilst reading.
Tension soon mounts as the isolation plays tricks on the
human psyche – or is the threat real? Jack is a man of science, and he is all
too eager to explain away the feelings of dread and menace he sometimes feels
when venturing outside. But as his last companions are forced to leave, and he
is left on his own in this unforgiving place, he soon finds that his rational
explanations are woefully inadequate to explain away the fear. Something evil
is afoot at Gruhuken, and it is slowly closing in.
Paver has achieved the art of balancing her narrative on the
fine line between reality and the occult, in a way that we are never quite sure
if Jack’s accounts are the unravelling of his own mind due to the constant
dark, the isolation and the absence of other human contact, or whether there
really is something evil haunting Gruhuken. All I know is that it was so
authentic and believable that I buried deep under my doona and wild horses
could not have made me go outside alone in the dark! Personally, I find that it
is very difficult to find a book where the supernatural element is just right –
enough to make you very, very afraid, but not over the top to make you having
to suspend disbelief. It is a balance achieved by very few, and Paver has
absolutely nailed it! One passage about the bear post in particular had my hair
stand on end as I pictured it so vividly in my mind.
Summary:
For anyone looking for a good ghost story with a rich,
atmospheric setting and a historical element (yes, this book has it all!), I
cannot recommend this book highly enough!
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