Circumnavigating Svalbard: My Love Affair with the Arctic, an essay by Cynthia Reeves

Thanks to Cynthia Reeves, author of The Last Whaler (Regal House, Sept. 3), for contributing the following essay about her research. I hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as I did.

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Circumnavigating Svalbard: My Love Affair with the Arctic

by Cynthia Reeves

Imagine this: You land by Zodiac at a remote beach on the southern shore of Van Keulenfjorden in the Svalbard archipelago, the site of an old beluga whaling station called Bamsebu, unprepared for what’s preserved there. Stretching to the horizon are whale bones, piles and piles of bleached beluga bones bearing silent testimony to the slaughter that occurred there in the 1930s. How is it, you wonder, that no one has been moved to incorporate this tableau into a story?

Piles of Beluga bones (photo by author)

I was inspired to write The Last Whaler when I came upon this sight during my 2017 Arctic Circle Summer Solstice residency aboard the barquentine Antigua. Prior to this encounter, my love affair with the Arctic was satisfied only through books, starting in childhood reading tragic tales of doomed Arctic explorers. This early interest later merged with concern for the impact of climate change on the Arctic’s fragile eco-system. Flying over the vast, undulating white terrain leading into Svalbard’s airport at Longyearbyen feels like entering another world—a frozen landscape riven with fissured glaciers spilling down into the ice-pocked waters of the archipelago. That this magnificent spectacle might one day vanish spurred me to commit Svalbard’s beauty to my writings in hopes of helping raising awareness of what could be lost.

The Last Whaler is the most ambitious of these works. The story centers around Astrid Handeland, a botanist who travels to Svalbard in 1937 with her whaler husband, Tor, hoping the sojourn will enable her to move on from the devastating death of their son Birk and to reconnect with her passion for Arctic flora. Instead, she discovers the reality of the challenges imposed by the unforgiving environment and her growing unease with her husband’s industry harvesting belugas. Ten years on, in the devastating aftermath of World War II, Tor returns to Svalbard to come to terms both with his wife’s death and his role in damaging the abandoned station’s once-pristine shores.

Research shaped The Last Whaler, above all because I had little familiarity with Svalbard and Norwegian history prior to my Arctic Circle expedition. In the two years following the expedition, I spent several months living in Longyearbyen and exploring the surrounding area to gain a sense of the unusual environment, from the days of perpetual sunlight to the nights of utter polar darkness. Aside from allowing me to absorb the physical landscape, these residencies also provided unique historical insights into Svalbard and Norway of the 1930s and 40s. For example, the former art gallery, Galleri Svalbard, housed a library of rare documents—including an original copy of the Norwegian botanist and environmental activist Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen’s Svalbards flora. Also contained in the library were journals, newspaper articles, memoirs, and other documents—often in Norwegian and unavailable elsewhere—that offered background into the lives of those who lived on Svalbard and in Norway during that time. I was especially captivated by the women who survived and even flourished in the Arctic. In addition to Resvoll-Holmsen, the novel features such real-life heroines as Christiane Ritter, whose memoir A Woman in the Polar Night details her year in 1935-36 on Svalbard with her hunter husband, Hermann; and Helfrid Nøis, who spent years carving a life as the “Arctic housewife” of the famous hunter Hilmar Nøis.

Moreover, the history of Norway in World War II required substantial research in order to assess its impact on Tor’s changing views on war, whaling, and women’s roles. Of particular interest were the heroism, and cowardice, exhibited by Norwegians during the war. Remarkable acts of bravery include the almost-mythical journey of Jan Baalsrud, who together with eleven other Resistance fighters sailed from Scotland to Bardufoss in northern Norway to sabotage a German airfield control tower. Baalsrud alone escaped capture and endured a harrowing trek across Norway to freedom in Sweden with the help of sympathetic Norwegians. Conversely, Lebensborn, the Nazi program of using Norwegian women to give birth to “perfect” Aryan children, plays a role in Tor’s life as he tries to protect his teenaged daughter from the predations of Nazi soldiers.

Pages from Charlier scrapbook, v.2t

The Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England, was also an invaluable source of Arctic history. There, I scoured rare documents, focusing on the biographies of polar explorers as well as ordinary people whose lives intersected with those more famous. One such story involved Anna Charlier, the fiancée of Nils Strindberg, one of the three occupants of S. A. Andrée’s hot-air balloon during its ill-fated attempt to sail over the North Pole. Quite by chance, I discovered among the artifacts five enormous, leather-bound volumes of newspaper clippings and other mementoes preserved by Charlier from the time of the balloon’s disappearance in 1897 through and after the discovery of the men’s bodies on Kvitøya in 1930. Her obsession culminated in asking her husband to bury her heart next to Strindberg’s grave in Stockholm, a request her husband honored after her death in 1949.

Charlier’s story is not only embedded in The Last Whaler but also the centerpiece of my next project. Again I will travel to Svalbard to circumnavigate the archipelago aboard the 2024 Arctic Circle Summer Alumni Expedition. On this trip—ice conditions permitting—I hope to explore the eastern side of the islands and get a glimpse of Kvitøya, an inhospitable spit of land that does not lend itself to landings. I’m curious about the kinds of obsessions that would drive Andrée and his companions to undertake their courageous (or foolish, depending on whose history you read) journey and that would illuminate Charlier’s eternal passion for Strindberg.

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author Cynthia Reeves (credit: 5L Photography)

Cynthia Reeves is the author of three books of fiction: the novel The Last Whaler (Regal House Publishing, 2024); the novel in stories Falling through the New World (Gold Wake Press, 2024), which was awarded Gold Wake’s Spring 2023 Fiction Prize; and the novella Badlands (Miami University Press, 2007), which won Miami University Press’s Novella Prize. Cynthia’s short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared widely. She has been awarded residencies to the Arctic Circle’s 2017 Summer Solstice and 2024 Alumni Expeditions, Hawthornden Castle, Galleri Svalbard, Art & Science in the Field, and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA program, she taught in Bryn Mawr College’s Creative Writing Program and Rosemont College’s MFA program as well as at conferences nationwide. She lives with her husband in Camden, Maine. Find out more at her website cynthiareeveswriter.com.

All the World Beside explores queer history in 1700s Massachusetts

Conley’s debut novel brings us to a small Massachusetts town—the symbolically-named Cana—while dramatizing an affair between two married Puritan men and its fallout.

In 1730, Nathaniel Whitfield is a charismatic minister whose powerful words on the pulpit had brought about a religious awakening and persuaded 200 souls to follow him to a new settlement. Physician Arthur Lyman and his family, recent arrivals from Boston, weren’t part of the original chosen group and are made to feel like continual outsiders. The two men are close friends and something more, which fills Nathaniel with intense guilt, while Arthur finds ways to draw closer to his lover.

Their secret, however, doesn’t remain so. After viewing the pair’s late-night meeting in the forest, in a scene reminiscent of Hawthorne, Nathaniel’s daughter Sarah gets firsthand evidence of problems within her family. Gradually, Nathaniel’s depressive wife Catherine realizes the truth, and so does Arthur’s forthright wife, Anne.

The two families’ unwitting complicity and silence, preferring not to voice a relationship they can hardly explain, ring true for the era. Even more, Nathaniel’s role comes with high expectations for another Christian revival, but his longings for men make him feel completely unworthy.

Conley confidently acknowledges the reality that queer people lived and loved in all past eras, one of his admitted goals, while imbuing his story with considerable depth about how religion can simultaneously exalt and constrain us. Notably, he looks beyond the core relationship to show its repercussions on family members, especially Sarah and her young brother, Ezekiel. (Actually, the later sections focus so much on others that the plot feels a bit diffuse.)

In a particularly intriguing subplot, Sarah gets held back by her gender after discovering a surprising talent. This novel has a lot going on, and it mostly works, all evoked in thoughtful language bordering on mystical at times.

All the World Beside was published by Riverhead in March; I reviewed it for August's Historical Novels Review. The author's first book, Boy Erased, was a memoir recounting his life with a fundamentalist Christian family that pressured him to enroll in gay conversion therapy.

Short takes on three female-centered historical novels I haven't reviewed here before

I managed to get in some good reading this summer!  Here are short takes on three novels I definitely recommend.

Kate Grenville’s Restless Dolly Maunder fictionalizes the life story of her grandmother, born in 1881 in rural New South Wales, Australia. She depicts Dolly as a complicated woman who endured disappointments and crushed ambitions but rose to make a financial success of her life – yet whose experiences hardened her character. Dolly’s daughter and granddaughter found her cold and domineering, and yet she broke open new paths for them with her persistence and drive. By the end, you may find Dolly’s personality difficult to like, but what she accomplishes with her life is undeniably admirable. It’s an insightful character portrait, told matter-of-factly and with clear-eyed understanding. Published in the US and UK by Canongate, Restless Dolly Maunder was shortlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction.  I read it from a Libby copy.

I found Gill Paul’s Scandalous Women irresistibly dishy from start to finish as it depicted the public lives and private worries of Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins, who steamed up the bestseller lists with their bold, unabashedly sexy, female-centered novels. They received backlash (and worse) from snooty, chauvinistic book critics and feminists alike but sold millions while opening doors for other female authors. Their journeys to success are fascinating, and I especially loved the insider scoop on the state of publishing in the 1960s and ‘70s. Paul intertwines their stories by seamlessly slipping in a fictional character, Nancy White, a recent college grad seeking entrée into the competitive, highly sexist New York publishing industry. Nancy’s story from naïve hopeful to groundbreaking feminist editor more than holds its own in this hugely entertaining tale about women’s empowerment, the supportive friends (male and female) that nurture them, and the importance of great storytelling. Scandalous Women was published last week by William Morrow, and I read it from a personal copy.

Continuing with the theme of women struggling against the repressive patriarchy, we have Paulette Kennedy’s The Devil and Mrs. Davenport, in which a housewife and mother in small-town Missouri in 1955 begins seeing visions and hearing voices from the beyond. I'd thought the author's first novel, Parting the Veil, was very good, and this one is even better.  While unnerved by her sudden paranormal talents, Loretta Davenport hopes to use them for good when she gets glimpses of a female murder victim’s final moments. But her husband Pete, a minister and professor at a local Christian university, is horrified and embarrassed, believing she’s delusional and that her behavior will derail his tenure pursuit. The combination of marital conflict, crime thriller, and paranormal mystery brings out the best of the author’s talents in character development and plotting. The more Loretta pursues answers, turning to a caring parapsychologist for help and understanding, the more controlling Pete becomes. The novel feels accurate in in its quaint mid-century household details, yet the overriding theme makes it clear that this era isn’t one that women should look back on with nostalgia. The Devil and Mrs. Davenport was published earlier this year by Lake Union, and I'd purchased a copy on Kindle.

A royal visit to 1922 Bangalore brings danger in Harini Nagendra's A Nest of Vipers

Offering an even twistier and broader-scope plot than the first two books in Nagendra’s series, A Nest of Vipers is dominated by the Prince of Wales’s impending visit to Bangalore in January 1922, and the British colonial government’s determination to quell potential violence by supporters of the Indian independence movement.

For the moment, Kaveri Murthy and her doctor husband, Ramu, plan to enjoy a VIP evening out at the circus with their friend Anandi to celebrate Kaveri’s matriculation certificate in mathematics. But events take several unusual turns.

After their backstage invitation from master magician Das and his teenage son, Suman, who are eager to meet the famous “lady detective,” Kaveri grows startled at reports of local burglaries. The magician’s act is high-risk even without its underlying message of freedom from British oppression, and ultimately his performance erupts into chaos. When Das vanishes, and Anandi’s abusive estranged husband is found stabbed, the couple know they must protect her, since she’s bound to be accused of his murder.

The dynamics in this volume are changing in intriguing ways, which distress Kaveri to no end. Her policeman ally, Mr. Ismail, has turned cold, telling her to back off the case, and Anandi also asks to be left alone.

With her firm moral compass, Kaveri pushes ahead anyway, despite the pain of going against her friends’ wishes. Her desire for a purpose in life feels very relatable. Ramu supports her implicitly, but as a woman in British India, her academic studies can only progress so far, and she’s not content to sit at home.

Besides the incisive character portraits, we have a complicated mystery grounded in its milieu, in which Indians wanting to escape colonial rule are divided on how best to achieve their goal: ahimsa (nonviolence) or brutal force. Definitely recommended, though start with book one (The Bangalore Detectives Club) for maximum appreciation.

A Nest of Vipers was published by Pegasus Crime in May, and I'd reviewed it for May's Historical Novels Review initially. Constable published it in the UK and in India. See also reviews of the first and second books: The Bangalore Detectives Club and Murder Under a Red Moon.

Scandinavian gothic has a feminine focus in Anna Noyes' The Blue Maiden

For the residents of Sweden’s Berggrund Island in 1825, the Blue Maiden is a fearful place. An uninhabited neighboring isle, its appearance shifts in dense fog and in morning light, showing itself changeable and untrustworthy—as typical of women, in their view.

The island’s perceived gender is no coincidence. It’s rumored that witches fly to a secret realm there, called Blockula, to conduct dark Sabbaths. Five generations earlier, over two dozen women were put to death by Berggrund’s men for purported witchcraft, an event that lingers in everyone’s minds, especially anyone born female.

Noyes’ bleak and poetic novel ripples throughout with this atmosphere of internalized misogyny. It’s a difficult environment for two motherless girls to grow up in. Beata and Ulrika are daughters of the island’s priest, misfits in this isolated place; their 17th-century ancestor was an accused witch who was only saved from burning due to her pregnancy. With only the village healer willing to speak of their late mother—the beautiful but mysterious Angelique, who died at Bea’s birth—the sisters grow obsessed with learning more about her.

Over time, the young women’s contrasting personalities become apparent. When a middle-aged mainlander arrives on the island to take up an inherited property, long-suppressed truths about the sisters’ family begin spilling out.

The Blue Maiden takes time to catch hold; Bea and Ulrika, although sympathetic due to their outcast status, are kept at an emotional distance. Bea proves to be the protagonist, but this doesn’t become obvious until past the midway point.

Those with an aversion to literary fiction should probably steer clear, but the beautifully described island scenery and rural customs have a compelling draw, combined with the women’s struggle to liberate themselves from patriarchal prejudice. The ultimate reveal is a shocking surprise that will reward patient readers of this moody Scandinavian gothic.

The Blue Maiden by Anna Noyes appeared from Grove Press in May; thanks to the publisher for approving my NetGalley access for review purposes in the Historical Novels Review.