I can’t quite believe I’ve never reviewed this book before when it’s the reason I wrote my own book. Land of the Midnight Sun: My Arctic Adventures (affiliate link to bookshop.org) is a TV tie-in book by Alexander Armstrong to accompany his three-part ITV series which took him from Norway to Sweden, up to Svalbard and then across the top of the planet to Alaska via Iceland, Greenland and Canada. I read this book at Hammersmith Apollo, waiting for Dara O Briain to appear on stage, going “I’ve done most of this journey and I did it without a TV production company funding me or babysitting me! If he can get a book out of it, so can I!”
Having re-read it for the first time in more than five years, I can now see why I’ve never reviewed it. This isn’t really the story of a man adventuring across the Arctic; it’s the diary of a man’s work trip. Oh, it features snow and ice and Northern Lights and whatnot but you can never quite shake off the picture of a man getting up in the morning, going to the office and coming home to a nice dinner cooked by his loving wife. There are no suits, dinners or wives in this but it still has more of an atmosphere of work than adventure.
It’s quite hard reviewing this. There’s a lot about it I dislike, so there’s going to be a certain amount of complaining but it does add up to more than the sum of its parts so I don’t dislike it overall. That said, I’m probably not going to read it again unless I either have to or find myself with nothing else downloaded on my Kindle. Oh, and for all its title – The Land of the Midnight Sun – there is no midnight sun. This takes place in the winter. Which makes sense, it’s when the Arctic is all snowy and beautiful and there might be Northern Lights but it doesn’t match the title!
It’s quite an interesting peek behind the scenes. The TV series starts with Armstrong arriving in the Arctic on a tiny Cessna into Bodo. In actual fact, the lot of them arrived on a commercial plane, settled into their nice, if unremarkable, hotel, and then went out to the back end of the airport to film this scene. It’s all quite matter-of-fact. You can almost feel “and then we got back in time for the budget meeting” hovering in the background. Then there’s a chapter on the Arctic survival training they do – this never appears on screen but is referred to frequently throughout the book. The crew are trained to survive in freezing conditions, as if they’re ever going to do anything except pop out of the hotel to film an activity carried out with experts before popping back.
The itinerary baffles me a bit. Fair enough to leave out Russia – its Arctic regions are, by and large, vast and barren. But why leave out Finland? Why start in Norway, then move east for a day in Sweden before going back to Norway? Why skip over some countries so quickly and linger in others? Canada gets about 11% of the book I think – Canada! – and Alaska gets about a third. I read the Alaska section with a map open and there’s no journey in Alaska – they fly to Fairbanks which they use as a base and then fly or drive out to various places for filming purposes before returning. My own journey stopped in Iceland but if I’d carried on, I’d have done it as a journey – maybe taken that spectacular train across Canada and then made my way across Alaska somehow, with various detours. As the rest of the book is dressed up as a journey around the Arctic, it feels weird to have it suddenly turn into “and then we popped up here, and then we flew down there, and then we hopped over here and then we came back and then we went over there”.
It skips over Europe pretty quickly as well. In Norway we get the aforementioned flying scene, then a fishing trip, then we take the train to Sweden for all of 36 hours. There’s one night in the Icehotel (which is far too expensive and exclusive for “you get your first hint of [disappointment] as you enter the 1970 swimming-pool-style reception” and “the high-tech sleeping bag smells of feet (that’s paraphrased)” and “we’re all fairly happy to learn whatever lessons need to be learnt about sub-zero hotels and move on to our next destination”. If I’d stayed at the Icehotel, you’d be getting blog posts about it from now to eternity! The cheapest room midweek in low season for one night is 6995 SEK today – that’s £569 / $670. It’s so easy to treat it as something you’ve had to tolerate rather than celebrate when a production company is paying off that credit card, though. Then there’s a storm that keeps them in the ordinary hotel in Kiruna an extra night during which Armstrong writes up his diary and then they go back to Norway in the morning. Arctic Sweden done!
Finland is missed out entirely. Back to Norway for an Arctic winter sea swim, a flight up to Kirkenes to fish for king crabs under the ice (even Armstrong is disappointed by this: “This scrupulous endeavour turns out to be for demonstration purposes only, as there are several pre-prepped Pingu holes with crab cages far beneath already”) and that’s it for Europe.
Svalbard is little better: there’s a trip to a rifle range to learn how to scare off a polar bear, although undoubtedly their guide/fixer will deal with that in real life. There’s a pointless trip to the air traffic control tower in a snowstorm. And there’s a skidoo trip out to a trapper’s hut which takes up three paragraphs. I’m sure the TV show is very beautiful but this book really isn’t selling it. Armstrong arrives at that trapper’s hut and immediately goes into a two-page soliloquy about how beautiful rural Northumberland is and where he’d like to live if not in England. Tell me about Svalbard! Give me an idea about what it feels like to be in a place that just doesn’t get light! Show me the landscape! I’m reading this for the Arctic, not for how many flight cases your people are dragging around with you! Seriously, this book spent longer explaining what a “hero” car is than it did on the skidoo trip into the wilds of Svalbard!
When we get to Iceland, there’s some Boris-style bumblings about an Iceland he hasn’t seen yet (mostly about the voice in the hotel lift), followed by a glima wrestling session. Ok, fine, that’s something local and colourful that you don’t normally get. Then there’s snorkelling in Silfra. Very nice, although I’d like to hear more about Þingvellir than that it’s “the remotest, bleakest landscape imaginable”. And last, he meets a friend of his neighbour (oh, let’s casually drop that said neighbour has his own vineyard and makes his own “exceptionally good white” and by the way, is the father of Emma Watson, Hermione Granger herself (“Wonder what happened to her…”)). Orri shows him Harpa, the big glass conference centre/opera house in Reykjavik (this is worthy of two sentences) and tells him about buying salmon farms to make them sustainable. ITV, send this insufferable man to visit one of Orri’s salmon farms! I’m not seeing the Arctic in this book at all! In Iceland, that’s pretty literal – of the three scenes, two take place inside!
Greenland is a little better. Armstrong goes out with the Sirius patrol, spending two days and a night on a dogsled and camping in a surprisingly warm tent. At last, we get to feel the snow and the atmosphere and the Arctic, rather than a man tolerating a work trip! There’s a bit of weirdness about male friendship – let me give you the paragraph and tell me if you think this is a bit weird:
If little strains of the Brokeback Mountain music are itching to make themselves heard in my head, they aren’t quite finding resonance. There is something so guileless and honest about two men in their twenties being able to discuss a bond of friendship as strong as this without making light of it, or feeling they even have to acknowledge the nudge-nudge naughty-postcard interpretation that has become the first instinct of the British. We love innuendo so much we’ll even truffle it out of perfectly innocent circumstances (Oi oi? A vicar? He MUST be banging some choirboy behind the altar. Two men out on patrol sharing a tent? They MUST be hanging out the back of each other).
That’s weird, right? But that paragraph aside, this is a lovely chapter. It gives the reality of dog-sledding (smelly, bumpy and with a lot less control than you think) without any real complaining, there’s scenery, there’s dinner in a warm tent, there’s camaraderie, there’s even Northern Lights. Why couldn’t any of this have permeated the rest of the book?
On the other side of Greenland, we get a helicopter flight over a glacier, a dogsled trip to an Inuit settlement and a night with an Inuit couple, an Inuit dinner back in town, an evening of polka dancing and a boat trip among icebergs. You know what? The Greenland chapters are probably the best of the book. I’ve spent so much of it frustrated that this man is on this adventure and doesn’t really seem to care but now he’s getting into it! Whoever planned the Greenland itinerary knew what they were doing!
And then onwards to Canada. There’s lunch with a couple who’ve escaped the city to live on a houseboat – you know the kind, they’re a dime a dozen on YouTube. Wood-burning stove, lots of art and a sentence I actually rather like: “[they] do nothing to unburden me of my deep-rooted suspicion that many of those people who make a great song and dance about being free spirits are often the most inflexible people you could possibly wish to meet”. Then they’re taken up to Dawson City, a gold-rush town where they’re taken to see a gold claim (a 3×3 hole at this stage), a glimpse at an abandoned dredging machine and several pages about drinking the Sourtoe Cocktail. It’s a cocktail with a mummified toe in it and it really doesn’t deserve nearly eight pages, especially when the entire Canada section is only 36 pages long.
And last, 68% of the way in, we get to Alaska. See why I think this book is unbalanced? Two-thirds to cover all of Europe, Greenland and Canada. A third on Alaska alone! That’s an entire pointless chapter on how Fairbanks isn’t very characterful, a chapter with a couple who live in the woods and make just about everything (and a lot of childish jokes when dinner turns out to be beaver). A chapter with the Dalton ice truckers – I like this chapter. It’s got an epic road trip, huge danger and a lot of community. There’s a trip to an Alaskan Native settlement, where it turns out no one knows what they’re doing there and no one really wants them there, even if they’re bringing pizzas and fish hooks with them (no one knows what to do with those either). You do get to hear about the effect of oil on the community, namely that everyone gets paid a £20K dividend from the oil companies so no one wants to do anything with their lives, which… well, it comes across a bit Daily Mail. “No one wants to work these days”, “entitled millennials”, you know? I don’t think Armstrong means to suggest that the Native Alaskans are entitled but that’s kind of how it comes across. Out to another gold-rush town, this one with hot springs. Armstrong says they’ve deliberately avoided any hot springs areas in Iceland so they could “discover” them and react authentically in Alaska, which just really takes any sense of travel, adventure or reality right out of the equation. Everything is scripted, pre-planned and calculated, even the presenter’s reactions to what he’s seeing.
And last, they fly off to Little Diomede, which is the smaller of two islands right between Alaska and Russia. The international dateline runs between Diomede and Little Diomede. Again, the locals aren’t delighted by their presence. They film Armstrong looking west towards Russia and then sit in the school to wait for the helicopter back to the mainland, where they have hot chocolate and Armstrong reflects on how wonderful the Arctic is, in a way I don’t think he’s done so far, and how wonderful the people are, although there have been some very back-handed compliments along the way.
So it’s interesting, in its way. I’d have liked to see someone else join the party, someone who could write about this adventure with more spirit and truly make it “my adventures in the Arctic” rather than “my work diary when I went somewhere other than the office”. Pop a journalist, an author, a content creator, anyone into the party. Do a Generator Arctic. I adore Generator Arctic. Back in about 2016, Chris Hadfield collected together various creators and artists and took them on a cruise around the Arctic on an icebreaker. They took photos, wrote and recorded an album, made vlogs, made other videos of all kinds, poured content over Instagram and then did at least one live stage show, in the cause of showing what the Arctic is really like, not the Attenborough-esque scenes of frozen tranquility. This series, and this book, could have done something similar. I know, it’s not the point of it; the point is to make a TV series and then make some more money cheaply and easily through the tie-in book by the nice man from the telly. I just think the book falls flat for me. See now why I decided I could write my own?