We return to present day England for the next title. Twelfth in a series of fifteen.
McCaughrean, Geraldine (2005). The White Darkness. NY: Harper Teen, 369 pages.
Evaluation and summary: What can I say about The White Darkness without giving away too much away? My professor has obviously read the book – she assigned it to the class. But the rest of you haven’t, as far as I know, and I don’t want to ruin it for you. Because I really like The White Darkness and highly recommend you read it yourself. Really, it was excellent – neck and neck with Montmorency in the race for my favorite read of the semester.
So I will say this concerning The White Darkness. The main character is Sym Wates, a fourteen year-old girl who is clumsy, shy and obsessed with Antarctic exploration, especially Captain Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates. Captain Oates, it should be said, is Sym’s imaginary friend and they converse frequently. Anyway, Sym sets off on a trip to Paris, courtesy of her Uncle Victor, and I don’t have to tell you that things quickly get out of hand from that point. Go read and it and find out what exactly happens.
I don’t think it gives too much away to discuss here my extreme dislike of Uncle Victor. Actually, scratch out extreme dislike and insert intense hatred: Uncle Victor got on my nerves quickly and remained there for the entire book. It was his many eccentricities that did it to me. Everybody has their own little quirks. Me, I like to sleep on the cold side of the pillow, and I’m sure you have your own peccadilloes. Uncle Victor on the other hand – what with his special diet, sleeping upright in a special chair, sleeping upright in a special chair facing a certain direction to align his brain neurons and thus gain IQ points – is a crashing bore. And like Dr. Franklin, Uncle Victor too has his real-life compatriots, a whole host of people who are unable to deal with reality and so take refuge in conspiracy theories and other idiotic notions. You know them: the people who think there was a plot to steal the election for Bush; the people who think there was a plot to steal the election for Obama; the Birthers; the Truthers; and so on and so on. I’m sure much of my visceral reaction to Uncle Victor is due to the fact I since avoid folks like him in real life, encountering his ilk in fiction is all the more aggravating.
I did grow quite fond of Captain Oates, who made for a much more interesting imaginary friend than did Tony Hawks in Slam, perhaps because Captain Oates, to my way of thinking, had a much more interesting life. Serving in Ireland, Egypt and India, he was the kind of adventurous and insanely brave young man that formed the backbone of the British Empire, nearly winning the Victoria Cross with the Inniskilling Dragoons prior to his gallant but futile self-sacrifice on the Scott Expedition. In short, Oates is almost a picture perfect version of the stiff-upper-lip-play-up-play-the-game British gentleman. The imaginary Oates who spends so much time with Sym, is aware that by dying in 1912, to such great acclaim, he avoided the anonymity that waited for him in the muck of Flanders:
“I told you before : I’m the luckiest of men! Think! Two years more and it could all have been ours: the Great War! Lice and rats. Drowning in mud. Shrapnel wounds. Mustard gas. One among millions known only unto God. Would that have been somehow preferable?
Too true, too true, although there can be little doubt that Oates would have been one of those mad bastards who went over the top kicking a football. (He also gives another reason he feels fortunate to have died in Antarctica, but I’ll let you discover it for yourself, as it’s part of The White Darkness’s grim charm).
Booktalk hook: Reading aloud the scene with the ponies and the killer whales would be a pretty effective attention grabber.