The Terror by Dan Simmons is 955 pages long—and only twice did I mutter, "Oh, get on with it, will you?" My dislike of long books makes that sentence, in and of itself, a good review. But I'll elaborate.
If one were to categorize The Terror, it would fall, I guess, in the area of historical sci-fi terror—if such existed. It's a fictionalized account of a two-ship British exploration team trying to find a North-West Passage through the Arctic Ocean in the 1850s. The crews, icebound for two years, deal with disease, improperly packaged food, morale—and an outsized Polar bear who frequently attacks, often killing but always maiming his victims. Finally, in the last hundred pages, the book turns into straight science fiction as the protagonist, a captain of one of the ill-fated ships, discovers a new "race" of humans who inhabit the Arctic. All in all, it's pretty much of a page turner. And turner. And turner.
Specifics:
1) "The Ice Master knew as he fell that his life now depended upon simple Newtonian arithmetic: Thomas Blankly had become a simple problem in ballistics." (page 337) At the time of the quote Blankly is attempting to avoid the clutches of the Polar bear monster by swinging on the ship's rigging. I do like a writer who can find a light touch in even the grimmest of moments.
2) Let's hear it for literary hooks. "Up until this Day and the loss of Lieutenant Little's boat with all his men … I suspect that many of us still thought that we might Live. Now we knew that the odds of that had all but Disappeared." (page 730) Now those are sentences that will keep a reader reading—at least IMHO. (BTW, the odd capitalization is because that quote is from an officer's diary of the 1850s.)
3) "He (Bridgens, an officer) had taught Peglar to read but had never succeeded in teaching Harry how to spell. (Awkward sentence. You'll see why in the next sentence.) Bridgens suspected—since Harry Peglar was one of the most intelligent human beings he'd (poor pronoun reference) ever known—that there'd been some problem with the constitution of the man's brain, some lobe or lump or gray area unknown to medical learning that controlled the spelling of words. Even in the years after he'd learned to decode the alphabet and read the most challenging of books with a scholar's insight and understanding, Harry had been unable to pen the shortest letter to Brigdens without reversing letters and misspelling the simplest words." (page 762) Truthfully my editor cap didn't go on until I was typing the above. What interested me first was the description of dyslexia without the term. So I started wondering when the problem had been identified and named. 1881, according to Wikipedia. And that information turned my wondering to whether Simmons had known or researched the history or if some editor had caught the problem. From the sentence construction above, I'll now go with the latter, and that drops Simmons a degree in my opinion of him as a writer. And that, in turn, disappoints me.
4) I found it interesting when I came across one sentence that, IMHO, seemed to sum up a major theme of the book. With all the problems the crews of the two ships faced, a mutiny was not unexpected. Shortly after the event, the following is written: "'All this natural misery,' Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. 'Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?'" (page 802) Sudden insight: IMHO what truly creates horror in that so-named genre of literature is not the troubles that happen to characters but the ways in which they react. Lord of the Flies comes immediately to mind. Maybe that insight on horror novels, movies, etc. is common knowledge, but The Terror is the first book to make it clear to me.
5) Another quote from the officer's diary: (BTW, at this point he has begun to experience dementia from starvation and the other ills with which he struggles.) "If there is a Godd … I … thank you, Deaare God." (page 845) I find that a well written sentence as it shows the character's philosophical doubts as well as his current mental state.
Bottom line: I do recommend The Terror, in spite of some problems touched on above. But I also add that truly liking LONG books will certainly increase the enjoyment.
PS: I never did like the chapters categorizing whales in Moby Dick, and there were times when sections of The Terror brought them to mind.
