An old-fashioned adventure and much more
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We live, more or less, in civilised times. We no longer need (those of us in the "first" and "second" worlds at least) to struggle daily against the forces of nature or battle savagely against each other. The seven seas have been sailed, the West won, small steps and giant leaps have been taken upon the Moon.
With all this has come the withering away of a certain type of novel: the stuff of Jack London or Melville or Robert Louis Stephenson. Nowadays tales of derring-do are thrust into deep space or fantastical neverwheres or soaked in rivers of guns'n'ammo related tech talk.
Reading "A Dream in Polar Fog" is like returning to the lost days of the great adventure novel. It is a powerfully yet sensitively told tale of a young American sailor, marooned among the Chukchi people of the Arctic Circle in the second decade of the last century. His hands maimed by a terrible accident, John Maclennan is left for dead by his comrades and forced to rely on a people who have been taught by long years amid the snows not to let anything, let alone a man's life, go to waste.
Yes, John finds life and love in his new home but this is no simplistic tale of the evils of the modern world as against the wisdom of the "noble savages". The Chukchi live and breathe as anyone else does, the wisdom they possess is one suited to their environment. They know full well that the white man looks down on them but they know too that they look down on the whites. They provide riveting company as we follow Maclennan's struggles among and beside them.
This is an excellent book, old-fashioned in only the very best sense.
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