Dark Matter (OrionBooks, 2010) is, as the subtitle advertises, a ghost story set in the Arctic wastes of the far north. Running at 243 pages (plus 15 pages of extra material), it marks Paver's first foray into spook fiction after a successful run in the young adult market with her Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series.
From the back cover:
What is it? What does it want?
Why is it angry with me?
January 1937.
Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely and desperate to change his life. So when he’s offered the chance to be the wireless operator on an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it.
Spirits are high as the ship leaves Norway: five men and eight huskies, crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year. Gruhuken.
But the Arctic summer is brief. As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave. He faces a stark choice. Stay or go.
Soon he will see the last of the sun, as the polar night engulfs the camp in months of darkness. Soon he will reach the point of no return – when the sea will freeze, making escape impossible.
And Gruhuken is not uninhabited. Jack is not alone.
Something walks there in the dark.
****
The setting of Gruhuken is well realised: ice and snow-covered; windy; cold. Cold enough that despite keeping the fire stoked, some parts of the expedition's hut's interior become rimmed with ice. When winter arrives it becomes both cold and dark. Suffering it alone would seem like suicide; at the very least, likely to drive someone to madness.
As expected this is what eventuates for Jack. As he is abandoned by his companions, mainly though medical necessity, he elects to stay on and suffer through the long night. His daily rounds include checking a weather station, and as the freezing cold weather worsens, he continues this routine – it's either that or go mad in his isolation. His struggle to maintain at least some sort of daily structure, against worsening cold and encroaching darkness, is a provider of mounting tension. Adding to this tension is a sense of something other; something evil lurking in the cold that gets bolder as time passes. Will his companions return before the evil – or even just the elements, or loneliness – take their toll?
As a period piece the story works quite well. Much is made of the class distinctions of the time, and of Jack's ingrained resentment of his well-to-do companions' easy path in life. Though a tad heavy handed at times, this goes some way to providing a reason for Jack's determination to not let the expedition fail, rather than just bailing out and leaving Gruhuken to whatever lurks there. I'll show them; I don't need to be born with a silver spoon in my mouth to succeed.
The novel is written in an epistolary format - aside from the prologue, each chapter is presented as from Jack's diary. This works well in that it forces the narrative into a measured structure and pace, so that the cold creepiness of the setting can slowly work its way in. It is unfortunate then that Paver changes to first person present tense for the climax. I can see why an author might consider this, after all, as a mode it conveys action more convincingly – but I found that it just jarred me out of the story.
Despite some disappointment with the climax and ending, I still think this is an accomplished ghost story. I would recommend it to anyone who likes the form, especially if you enjoy modern takes by the likes of, say, Jonathan Aycliffe. Hell, I'd even recommend it to anyone who likes Arctic expedition stories (the 15 pages of extra material about the “real” expedition this is based on is a great read*).
Given that Aycliffe seems to have disappeared from the publishing world (other than producing Daniel Easterman thrillers, that is), it would be nice to see Paver produce more of this type of thing. Pretty please.
(*Note: I don't remember having this section in the hardback edition I read, but the paperback I subsequently bought advertises “exclusive material inside”. Just be aware of the differences in editions!)
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