Title: The Magnetic North
Author: Wheeler, Sara
Published by: Vintage
Year: 2010
First published: Jonathan Cape, 2009
Date reviewed: 11.10
ISBN: 9780099516880

Fourteen years after her excellent book on Antarctica, Terra Incognita, Sara Wheeler is back among the ice floes, but this time at the other end of the Earth’s axis, the Arctic. The world has changed in that time. She now has two children and concern for their future has sharpened her awareness of the looming environmental catastrophe facing the planet. In Antarctica the scientific research was interesting. Now the melting ice is an urgent reality. In this book Wheeler describes how the changing world has affected the Arctic north and its native people.

There is no Arctic equivalent of the Antarctic land mass, so her approach is different. She visits a series of areas round the Arctic Circle: Siberia, Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Svalbard, and back to Russia. Her style is the same as in Terra: each chapter is a mixture of careful observation of the people she meets interwoven with well-researched historical accounts, all delivered with occasional ironic or sly humour.

She finds little of the romantic image of the North created in the footsteps of the early explorers. Exploitation and marginalisation of native people have virtually destroyed their traditional way of life, and although there are a few examples of the current generation trying to reconnect with their past the impression is that mostly this is a lost cause. In the vast expanse of the Russian north, communities that enjoyed some meagre prosperity under the Communist system are now forgotten and drifting into dereliction. Everywhere the push to grab and exploit the region’s resources has destroyed the habitats and migration patterns of the wildlife on which people used to depend, leaving them reliant on expensive goods and services brought in from elsewhere. The lucky can earn a living, the less lucky can live on welfare, and the least fortunate have neither.

Throughout the book the spectre of climate change and global warming haunts the Arctic. As the glaciers and sea ice melt the drillers and miners move in. More ships ply the newly ice-free ports, adding their exhaust to the greenhouse gases that are melting the ice and drowning the polar bears. But although Wheeler is clearly concerned about these issues her reportage style is understated rather than polemical.

While the issues are serious, I don’t want to give the impression that this is a depressing book: it isn’t. It’s interesting, amusing, entertaining. Her labelling of the early Arctic explorers as “shoe-eaters” echoes her dismissal in Terra of their Antarctic counterparts as people “trying to see how dead they could get”. The stories of the Gulag may be horrendous, but she treats the present-day people she meets with warmth and respect. Being a fan of Sara Wheeler’s earlier books I looked forward to reading this one and although it wasn’t quite what I expected I have to hand it to her as another excellent achievement.