A personal account of a journey to Antarctica, interwoven with the story of a new novel exploring themes of environmentalism, redemption, and the transformative power of nature.
As the ship pulled away from the dock, I considered what lay before me: the darkening calm of the Beagle Channel, the terrifying swell of the Drake Passage, and then, glittering like a prize, Antarctica . This was a journey sparked 20 years earlier, by a school geography project. Cutting out magazine photographs of penguins and whales to stick on my ‘All About Antarctica ’ poster, I’d felt something kindle inside me.
I’d imagined sun-carved icebergs, vast and glittering, with penguins porpoising in their lee. There would be seals basking on ice floes, and albatrosses riding updrafts on their colossal wings; big-bellied humpbacks breaching the surface. It was an ecological paradise, free from human interference. And now here I was, on the deck of MS Fram (named after the legendary expedition ship used by Norwegian explorers Fridtjof Nansen and then Roald Amundsen), embarking on the voyage south — and a new novel. The Edge of Solitude tells the story of Ivy — a disgraced 75-year-old environmental activist. Desperate to redeem her reputation, and so to salvage her relationship with her son, she offers her services to a billionaire’s controversial Antarctic conservation project. Like mine, Ivy’s journey begins in Ushuaia, the world’s most southerly city, at the tip of Argentina. Fin del mundo. The end of the world, she says, is the beginning of everything.But as Ivy journeys further south, she must wrestle with her past mistakes, her ambition and what she owes the natural world around her. Like me, Ivy encounters the haunting beauty of icebergs drifting in the channels, the still black water with grease ice suspended below its surface like tiny translucent jellyfish, and the creaks and cracks of glaciers tumbling to the shore. She marvels at penguins and seals and breaching whales. But Antarctica is far from an untouched paradise. My final landing was on Deception Island: a natural harbour in the caldera of a volcan
Literature Environment Antarctica Voyage Novel Environmentalism Redemption
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