Jeffrey Keeten's Reviews > Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition

***This is seriously the perfect gift for the men in your life. I know how difficult we can be to buy gifts for, but your dad, husband, brothers, uncles, friends, and lover(s) will absolutely love this adventure set in the snows and ice of The Farthest North.***

Let’s set the stage.

”From somewhere out in the bunched and knuckled hills came the plaintive howl of a wolf. Adolphus Greely, adjusting his spectacles and gazing at the three tall masts of the Proteus piercing the horizon, had cause for excitement and trepidation. For as his men lowered the whaleboats, and the twenty-eight-foot steam launch dubbed the Lady Greely, it occurred to him that they were 250 miles north of the last known Eskimo settlement, and more than 1,000 miles north of the Arctic Circle. They were, in fact, now the most northerly colony of human inhabitants in the world. They were being left, quite literally, at the end of the earth.”



You are, fair reader, in for a grand adventure once you decide to pick up this book, but what you may not expect is that there is a love story woven into this tale. Not the... “what happens in the sleeping bag in the Far North stays in the Far North” type of fumbling romance, but some of that soulmate mysticism. When the bumbling Adolph Greely first meets the lovely and intelligent Henrietta, I wouldn’t have bet a single farthing on his chances, but he is persistent. She finally says,…”woo me with letters.”

Don’t you just frilling love that? Not illiterate phone texts, but real letters, composed by the heart.

I can see Greely at his desk, eyeglasses askew, hair mussed, surrounded by the crumpled remains of his wooing efforts, calling for a muse, any muse, to give him the words that will win him the attention of this lovely creature.

He must have wielded a deft pen because he does convince Henrietta to be his wife. They have two daughters, and then he promptly sets off for the frozen North on a polar expedition.

Now before you start thinking that men don’t care about romance, I can assure you they do. When a man is in the trenches and mortars are landing all about him, or sitting in a cooking pot in the South Pacific surrounded by cannibals, or freezing to death on an iceberg near the Arctic Circle, I know that every man’s last thoughts will be of his wife, his mother, his sister, or a lost lover (male/female, take your pick). Henrietta, through all the trials and tribulations that are about to happen to Adolph, is never far from his mind.

Things, needless to say, go wrong for the expedition. I’ve never read an adventure story that unbelievable, disastrous things don’t happen. A clue resides in the subtitle…”The Triumph and TRAGIC Greely Polar Expedition.” Death is hardly a good trade off for triumph. The use of the word TRAGIC is why I prefer to experience wretched, cataclysmic exploration from the safety of my reading chair.

I did put off reading this book until we had a snow storm. I prefer authenticity of weather to enhance my reading experience. I was able, while taking a break from reading to stretch my legs to walk out my sliding glass door and let the flakes of snow hit me in the face. I could imagine without too much effort that my deck was an iceberg. It helped to have Buddy Levy’s vivid images in my mind. ”A giant iceberg was thundering toward them from the north. Men looked up to see a mass of white upon them and then felt a shuddering jolt of impact from the collision. The immense pressure of the striking pack tore great rifts in their small berg, splitting its surface into canyons. They scurried wildly, leaping over deep fissures, hurrying to secure food and boats and gear as the ice rent and ruptured underfoot.”

Holy whale of ice!

Or how about this one: ”There was nothing to see in the distance but vastness--water and ice and rock. Their drift was at first gradual, almost imperceptible. But constant was the awful groaning and creaking and splitting of the ice pack, a sound so eerily hideous that it had come to be known as ‘the Devil’s Symphony.’ The sound of ice grinding against ice, shearing and shrieking, was an omnipresent reminder of their unimaginable frailness in this vast and dangerous place.”

If I closed my eyes, the tinkling of the windchimes hanging from my trees, mixed with the jake braking of a semi on the bypass, became the rendering of rubbing ice.

So the goal of this expedition is to go as Far North as they can to fill in what were, at the time, blank spots on the map and take scientific readings that will be useful for future study. They accomplish both of these things. I will say that, even as their lives became imperiled, these men never stopped doing their job. Their hope was, even if they perished, that someone eventually will find their journals. When their ship does not arrive that is supposed to take them home, Greely makes the decision to head south to try and find a point that will make it easier for them to be rescued. The Arctic is not only unpredictable but also undeniably, brutally dangerous, and this trip across the frozen ice is fraught with peril.

Ships are trying to get to them, but the ice is too thick. One boat sinks with a year’s worth of supplies for them. It becomes a cocked up mess. It doesn’t help that Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln, one of the most powerful people in Washington, is against the expedition from the beginning. If his name sounds familiar, it is because he is the son of Abraham Lincoln. When the dire circumstances of the Greely expedition are relayed to him, he is none too keen on spending more money on what he feels would be a fruitless endeavor, looking for dead men.

Lincoln will soon be contending with Henrietta, who is shaking every tree and turning over every rock for any people who have any close connections capable of putting pressure on the government to try to find her husband.

I think one of the signs of a good book is when I am thinking about the book even when I’m not reading the book. It is even better when I am wondering what the characters, or in this case real people, have been doing while I was away. I would hope that Kislinbury has finally shot a walrus for the much needed meat or that Rice has finally found that cache of supplies left by another expedition or that Brainard has learned how to net more tiny shrimp for the stew. By the middle of the book, these men are as real for me as people I’ve known for years.

The book is loaded with pictures that are scattered strategically throughout the text. You won’t have to wait for the standard grouping of pictures in the middle of a book to see the visual evidence of what you have been reading about. This compelling account is written like a thriller. Buddy Levy will keep you turning the pages late into the whale oil lit night with his tension enhancing short chapters and evocative descriptions of horrendous and amazing circumstances.

Really, forget about getting this book for someone significant in your life, and keep it for yourself. You can give it to them for Father's Day or Mother's Day or their birthday... after you finish reading it. Did I say this book was for men? I must have been half in the bag when I wrote that. If you enjoy a tale well told, you will appreciate this gem of an adventure. If you are a man, woman, or alien, you will identify with their struggles and will root for them as if they are an astronaut lost on Mars.

Highly recommended! If people are disappearing from family gatherings, they have most likely been gifted this book and are squirreled away in some reading nook on their way to the Far North.

”To die is easy, very easy; it is only hard to strive, to endure, to live.”--Commander Adolph Greely

I want to thank St. Martin’s Press for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten