In 1895, the arctic explorer Captain Ian Ryder has let his house in
Blackpool on the Nova Scotia coast to the recently married Clara Weiss,
who is about to become the compass of a social circle far too intimate
for its own good. Lost in a maze of obsessive Victorian pseudo-science
and its ignorant fascinations with violence, spiritualism, the
reanimation of corpses, the channelling of passions, and especially with
the control of every aspect and function of the body, particularly the
bodies of women, these characters are increasingly rendered impotent by
the collision of their fantasies with their repressions--the sadism of
their lust to penetrate others, and the masochism of their own
constricted closures.
As Captain Ryder says of his crew as his claustrophobic ship continues
to drift, trapped in the harsh white light of the polar ice: "How
repelled I feel by this promiscuity with individuals for whom I truly
feel nothing but aversion."
Set in the year Freud published his ground-breaking essay on hysteria,
this is a compulsively readable, beautiful and dark novel of personal
relations so close they verge on the incestuous, and desires so vast
they approach the cold crystalline purity of the archetype.
