A couple years ago, AMC produced a TV series based on this book. Jason and I really enjoyed it, and I decided I wanted to read it. I had kind of forgotten about it until reading Fatal Passage by Ken McGoogan, about John Rae, the explorer who discovered what happened to the Terror and Erebus.
It was a long read (over 700 pages), but very enjoyable. Even knowing what happens, I found myself wanting to keep reading each night, wanting to keep pushing past when I should have lain down and gone to bed.
Brief overview:
In 1845, an expedition lead by Sir John Franklin sets out from England to discover the long-searched-for Northwest Passage - a water route between the Northern Atlantic and Northern Pacific oceans. The Franklin expedition - 129 men and two ships, the Erebus and the Terror - never returns and there are no confirmed survivors. This is an imagining of the horrors the crew encountered while marooned in the Arctic, including extreme winter weather, scurvy, tainted food stores, impossibly difficult physical labor, the hubris of their captain, rats, fire, and, last but not least, a monster resembling a huge polar bear that stalks the mission.
The first part of the book is told in flashbacks. It opens with now-Captain Crozier on deck, in the bone-shattering cold, giving kind of a "how we got here" overview in his head. The chapters then go back and forth for a while between a few characters - Captain Sir John Franklin, Dr. Goodsir, and others - give background on events leading up to Crozier's current situation.
Goodsir serves as kind of an everyman - an audience avatar - when he volunteers to go on an exploratory mission and fails miserably at keeping up with the hard work the other sailors endure, as well as expressing shock at Captain Franklin's callous disregard for the life of the native man his men shot by accident.
Franklin immediately establishes himself as the one who carries the blame for various failures. At a dinner party, a seasoned explorer expresses concerns that Sir John doesn't have enough supplies - of food or coal. Franklin has no clue how much he's actually bringing with him; he feels like this is someone else's job to figure out. He just smiles and nods while the other explorer grows obviously more concerned about this voyage. Franklin comes off as a hubristic idiot. Actually, calling him an idiot isn't fair - he seems to be doing it on purpose. He repeatedly ignores sound advice from Crozier - his second in command - other explorers, and various officers on his mission. There are so many things that just would not have gone wrong if he had just listened to other people... but, no, determined to rid himself of his reputation as "the man who ate his shoes" on his previous Arctic mission, he plows ahead, so certain of his own infallibility.
As mentioned above, Sir John often expresses the thought that the natives are somehow less - not worthy of saving from death, not worthy of a proper burial... In the book, many other characters also express this period-accurate disdain for the Arctic peoples they encounter. (In the show, this is toned down, with some of the characters seeming to be pro-native, and even speaking some of the Inuit language.) As was also par for the period, there's a decent amount of disdain for women, Irish characters, characters of non-noble birth, and homosexuals (exclusively referred to as "sodomites").
While the setting is bleak, and often gory, and even the most likeable characters flawed, you do find yourself rooting for most of them, hoping that at least SOME of them make it.
I've read some other reviews and opinions that the last few chapters and the fates of a couple of characters comes out of nowhere, but I didn't think so. I thought it was the sort of thing where everything these two had experienced, everything they had endured together came together to form only one possible, inevitable scenario. Want to know more?
Here be spoilers...
In the show, Captain Crozier and Lady Silence - the native woman who's father was accidentally shot by the crew - end up being the only survivors. He's taken in by her people, but their connection ends there (or at least is no more special than them both being part of a very small, close-knit community). In the book, she rescues him when he's shot multiple times by mutineers, and nurses him back to health over a period of several months. She teaches him to live like a native. They share dreams - as they began to do when Crozier suffered from severe alcohol withdrawal earlier in the book. Eventually, she takes him to be her husband. I do mean that - Lady Silence/Silna is the one who initiates a physical relationship with Crozier, though by that point he understands that they also have an intertwined fate. Their interractions in the last couple chapters seem less to me "out of nowhere" and more what happens when two people have been through so much trauma together that they come to realize that each of them is the only person who could understand the other. It's not romantic, per se, but it's fitting.
And, yes, people have complained about the age difference. Crozier is in his early 50's by the end of the book, whereas when the expedition encountered Lady Silence two years earlier, the doctor determined she was between 15 and 20 (much younger than in the TV adaptation). Yes, this is a shocking age difference by today's standards... but in the 1840's it was not. Indeed, Crozier had proposed about five years earlier to a woman in her early 20's who turned him down not for his age, but for his station (she claimed she couldn't be a mere captain's wife). Girls in their teens were married to men old enough to be their grandfathers all the time back then. For me, what sells it is that Silna knows exactly what she is doing and it is Crozier who seems surprised at first, as well as their ironclad devotion to each other through the remainder of the book. Each is willing to give up their world and follow their spouse; Crozier is the one who gives up his old life to be with Silna.
Really the only thing I found to be problematic in the book is the outdoor New Year's carnivale. For so much of the book, the author has been hammering into us what the extreme cold is like for the crew. The (heated) intterior of the boat is only just barely above freezing on the warmest decks. The crew are wearing layers upon layers. They are constantly losing toes. The men on watch on the deck have to constantly move, constantly stomp to keep from freezing. More than once someone accidentally touches metal and loses skin for their carelessness. And yet at the Carnivale, where we are told it is a whopping -100 degrees, men stay out wandering around, eating outside, hanging out in a tent labyrinth, wearing costumes either over or under their cold weather gear... for hours! It just seemed glaringly out of place to me.
I did think it was interesting that at one point a crew member references the wreck of the Essex, an American whaling ship sunk during an encounter with an enraged whale, marooning its crew in life boats in the tropical Pacific. It reminded me that I had also read a book about that incident a few years ago. I'll have to do a compare/contrast of the two.
It occurred to me recently that I should include Readers' Advisory at the end of reviews. This is a book for both fans of history, and fans of horror. In particular, if you like setting-based suspense and horror - something like Sphere, where you're trapped by the elements with a dangerous and unknowable presence. For the history fans, if you like The Terror, you might also enjoy In the Heart of the Sea, by Nathaniel Philbrick, and Fatal Passage by Ken McGoogan.