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.