Dark Matter (2010) by Michelle Paver

Dark Matter (2010) by Michelle Paver: It's 1937 and a quintet of Oxfordians has received funding to create a research station above the Arctic Circle on an island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard and then winter there. But they need someone trained in the sciences, and so Jack Miller earns that right after an interview. 

As an impoverished clerk forced to give up his studies in physics due to money problems, Jack Miller is of a much different social class than the rest of the group. There will be tensions from this -- Miller is acutely aware of all the quirks of the 'Old Boy' Oxfordians from the moment he walks into that interview. But his job and life are deeply unsatisfying, and while Jack doesn't believe that the expedition will permanently change anything in his life, it will at least be an adventure.

But as the expedition gets whittled down by one before it ever leaves England because of an illness in one member's family, and as another member has to return home after breaking his leg while in transit, the whole thing starts to look just a little cursed. And they haven't even landed yet.

Told primarily in the form of entries from Jack Miller's Arctic journal, Dark Matter is a superb 'old-school' ghost story with a contemporary spin in terms of its musings on class and gender identity. The descriptions of the often alluring, always Sublime Arctic are superb. The characters are engaging, none moreso than our narrator, whose childhood and adult traumas he has brought into the Arctic just as the long night is falling.

Paver builds suspense and terror gradually, just as she did in her later Himalayan ghost story Thin Air. She has a thing for extreme environments, British class issues, and angry ghosts. For a ghost there is, though how much of the expedition's mounting woes are ghost-related and how much simply the result of environment and character remains a question until the climax.

Paver also throws in a lovable sled dog named Isaak for the reader to worry over as tensions mount and problems multiply. Will the dog survive? Will anybody?

My minor quibble is the title itself, which Paver seems to have decided upon before really beginning the novel. It takes a certain amount of shoe-horning to get the concept of 'dark matter' into a novel set in 1937. But I think the title and the metaphoric nature of the concept, discussed in the novel, is the only real 'Flashing Neon Sign of Meaning' the novel has. 

Look, I don't like such Neon Signs, but some people are perfectly happy with them. But you will have a character explain that title some time in the book, and it comes across like those moments in the later Mission: Impossible movies in which a character apparently has to say the word or words in the movie's subtitle.

I don't quibble with Paver's choice to begin the novel with a letter written by one of the characters other than Jack Miller a decade after the events of Dark Matter. The letter doesn't give anything away, exactly. More importantly to Paver's vision, it ensures that all three expedition members have a chance to write 'in their own voice,' as Gus, the third member, has excerpts from his own journal entries interpolated into Miller's narrative. There's a narrative fairness here insofar as Miller's own views of the other two members are, of course, unreliable.

In all, this is a very fine ghost story, told with a generosity of spirit and an admirable economy of pages. Where will Paver's next ghost story of privation and the Sublime be set? Antarctica? Peru? The Moon? Only time will tell. Highly recommended.

Thin Air (2016) by Michelle Paver

Thin Air (2016) by Michelle Paver: It's 1935. Upper-class British twits throng the unconquerable places of the globe seeking to conquer them. The poles have been penetrated. Only a handful of mountains remain upon which to plant the Union Jack. All a group of British mountain-climbers need to reach the summit of the third-highest mountain in the world, Kangchenjunga in the Himalayas, is fortitude and a small army of Sherpas and other native supply-carriers.

To Kangchenjunga come Stephen and 'Kits' Pearce and several others. The Pearces are semi-estranged upper-class brothers, older 'Kits' the adventurer and Stephen the doctor the expedition now requires, its previous doctor having fallen ill. Stephen wants to prove himself. 'Kits' just wants to emulate the heroes he spent his boyhood reading about. When it comes to Kangchenjunga, that hero was Edmund Lyell.

Lyell led an ill-fated, high-casualty expedition up Kangchenjunga in 1906. Then he grew rich and famous on his account of that expedition and the fame and adulation it brought to him. Lyell is now dead. On their way to Kangchenjunga, the Brits visit Charles Tennant, the last survivor. He lives close enough to Kangchenjunga to see it out his study window in the distance. But when Stephen questions him as to what really happened on that disastrous, lucrative foray into old and darkness, Tennant throws him out. Old nerves?

Well, we'll find out.

Michelle Paver does a marvelous job evoking so many things in this novel, from the privation of high-altitude mountain climbing to the petty bickerings of sibling animosity to the casual racism and classism of the typical upper-class Brit in 1935. It's made even more marvelous by her attention to brevity. Thin Air is almost a novella in length; all one wants at the end is more, even as one admires the skill required to tell a ghost story in short, sure strokes.

Or is it a ghost story? As in many ghost stories, Thin Air suggests human frailty and guilt as possible explanations for the seemingly supernatural at certain points of the narrative. That doesn't mean either/or -- the ghosts inside and the ghosts outside jostle for primacy in many of the greatest tales of the supernatural. Paver has written something at novel length here that can stand beside great ghost stories by Shirley Jackson, M.R. James, and Robert Aickman, all with a piquant taste of post-colonial cultural criticism. Highly recommended.