This was one of the little pile of books I bought as a reward for having my second jab. Well, if you’re going to go all the way to Salisbury to have a needle stuck in you, you may as well pop into the bookshop. Quite a few books caught my eye and this is the one I took camping with me to read first. Icebreaker: A Voyage Far North by Horatio Clare. Nice dark blue cover with a stylised icebreaker smashing through ice, all in white and oranges. Looks good.
If you want to read it, you can buy it here (affiliate link to bookshop.org which supports independent bookshops in the UK rather than Jeff Bezos)
The author has been invited to spend a few weeks as a guest on an icebreaker off the coast of Finland up in the Bay of Bothnia and therefore the book covers ice, icebreaking and Finnishness. Doesn’t it just sound like a book written specially for me? I’m sorry it’s taken four years for me to stumble across it, Mr Clare.
And yet the reality of reading it… it didn’t captivate me. The cover quotes are full of words like “hilarious”, “witty” and “amusing” but it wasn’t. I’m not going quite so far as to call it dry but I didn’t notice anything funny about it, unless you call the hundredth mention that “Finns are kind of shy and introverted!” funny.
It’s educational, I’ll give it that. I had no real idea of what icebreakers actually do, apart from the one that ferried Generator Arctic around Greenland and Canada a few years ago – now that was an icebreaker project I really enjoyed. And it makes me want to go to Finland and go out on an icebreaker, so that’s definitely a success. I can live with a boat that never feels like it’s on a boat because the ice prevents the motion you’d normally feel on a boat.
And the ice? Well, it kind of annoys me that the book persistently uses the Finnish for different kinds of ice because I lost track of which is which so early on but on the other hand, it makes perfect sense. English just doesn’t have the words for the variety of ice that a Finnish icebreaker is going to encounter. Ice is ice. Well, it turns out it isn’t, of course, especially when it’s being cracked and churned and refrozen and it’s absolutely fair to give different names to different types. But I lose track of the difference between shuga and nila and firn and sastrugi and they quickly cease to mean anything except that the ship’s crew know what they’re doing and I don’t.
This book is also 100% the reason why I’ve started to learn Finnish. I have no plans, intentions or hopes of becoming fluent but at the moment, Finnish is just gobbledegook to me and I want to learn enough to be able to spot verbs, nouns and the odd word I recognise. You’ll get the post on that next week.
It also made me feel guilty for still having not even tried to read the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic. It’s sitting on my shelf but it’s more than an inch thick and it’s a poem, a long poem, and that’s intimidating. Judging by the chapter on the subject in Icebreaker, just about everyone and everything in Finland takes their name from this book. It’s Finland’s entire national character and culture in 700 pages. Tolkien read it – Tolkien read everything – and when I do get around to it, I expect to find some names or themes that I recognise, just like when I read the Norse Eddas.
Then we get Finland’s histories with Sweden and Russia and how those pasts still colour Finland’s relationships with its closest neighbours to this day and again, there’s a lot. Quite how Finland has retained its Finnishness after centuries of being squeezed between and owned by bigger and more powerful nations continues to astonish me. Estonia did the same thing – how did it remain Estonian when it seems to have only been independent for about forty years out of the last nine hundred? How has this Finnish national identity survive? How are Finns so different to everyone else when they were everyone else for so long?
And so, yes, to the subject of “what Finns are like”. It’s always such a generalisation, to describe the people of an entire nation. No one hesitates to say that “Americans are really loud” and it certainly seems to be true of any American tourists I’ve encountered but it can’t be true of all 333 million people. It just can’t. Americans like to say that “the British are polite and reserved” but I suspect Europeans, who have to live next to us, would describe the British with words like “drunk” and “obnoxious” and “arrogant” because have you met British tourists? And we’re even worse when we’re at home. This book is adamant that Finns are quiet and shy and introverted and perhaps broadly it’s kind of true but on the other hand, the only Finns Clare encounters are the ones who work on the icebreaker and it seems eminently possible that spending weeks on the ice breaking routes for merchant shipping is simply more suited to the more introverted type, in the same way that party planning and DJing and acting are more suited to the more extroverted type. I don’t exactly object to Finns being described thus but I’m also very aware that Clare’s sample of Finnish personalities is about six people. You can’t make a sweeping generalisation from six people and this generalisation gets repeated so many times.
The writing veers from too dry to too purple. There are page after page of infodump on history or mythology or psychology or ice and then there’s entire paragraphs I skim over where the exact colour of the daylight on the ice is raved over for far too long. I like the idea of this big white sea and the pastel blue and pink skies I know from my own Arctic trips, I’d like to see it for myself but it doesn’t take three full pages to describe the scenery. As for Finnishness, and facts about the ship, Clare frequently gets out his notebook to ask blunt questions of the rest of the crew – not weaving them into conversation but literally interviewing them. It must feel like an interrogation at times. “What does Kalevala Day mean to you?” How does anyone answer that, let alone the introverted Finns he’s only known for a week or two? Could you not talk in a more natural way about the Kalevala and Finnish independence and get the answers out of a chat? He even takes his notebook into the sauna. To be fair, if I knew that I was getting an entire book out of my three-week visit, I’d be tempted to do that too. But if you’re going to be rigidly journalistic, you need to make the book flow more comfortably.
I think that’s the problem with Icebreaker: it’s trying to cover everything and by the time it’s squeezed in all things Finnish and all things ice, there isn’t a lot of room left for amusing or hilarious. It doesn’t quite seem to know what it wants to be. Of course, it needs a certain amount of background information and of course, if you’re going to write a book about Finland, especially about antics off the Finnish landmass, there’s plenty of history that you can’t just skip over. But if it’s going to be a travelogue about “a voyage far north”, it needs more about the voyage and less being weighed down by all the extra background information it wants or needs to include.
My last criticism of the book is that it could do with a map. I’m vaguely familiar with Kemi because my train from Helsinki to Rovaniemi stopped there and there’s a tourist icebreaker I’d really like to go for a ride on. It’s very expensive which is why I haven’t done it yet. But I had no idea where Oulu or Raahe or Tornio are and I think it would make a lot more sense with a map in the front.
In conclusion: I didn’t actually hate this book. I think there’s a lot of potential and there’s a lot that’s interesting, or nearly interesting and it could have been a strong contender for one of my favourite travelogues. I think if you’d had a few writers on that voyage and they’d all written a book about it, they’d all be very different and my favourite would have been by one of the others. But, you know, I was interested enough to finish it and then to write about it, and to start to learn an entirely new language off the back of it.