IT'S COLD OUTSIDE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 39, Issue 988, 25 July 1958, Page 12

IT'S COLD OUTSIDE

MEN AGAINST THE FROZEN NORTH, by Ritchie Calder; Allen & Unwin, Enfglish price 16/-. NORTH OF SIXTY, by Colin Wyatt; Hodder & Stoughton, English price 17/6. NANSEN: A FAMILY PORTRAIT, by Liv. Nansen Hoyer; Longmans, Green & Co., English price 30/-.

|| (Reviewed by

D. W.

McKenzie

ITCHIE CALDER is a firstclass journalist with far more than just an eye for a good story. He has already written wise and lively books based on travel in the jungle and the desert where he is concerned with what men are doing in pioneering new ways of life and using new techniques. In Men Against the Frozen North he applies this approach to the Arctic, It is less informative than his earlier books only because the area he describes has been so often written about, and written about So well, He is excellent in discussing the

Position which the Eskimo must hold in development of the Northlands, of the efforts of the Canadian authorities to segregate him, and of his relations to European techniques. But even more interesting is his description of the life of members of Air Force teams in the North, and the contrast between them and the old "bush-pilot." The aeroplane and its manifold uses has transformed the formerly inaccessible wastes, but one new development Calder ' describes is that of the helicopter, which just squats down as bad weather approaches, to take off again when it clears-unlike the aeroplane which when weather troubles approach must search, sometimes in vain, for a landing ground, This is a book at once informative and exciting, Colin Wyatt is a man who visits the Northland to write a book, because he is a professional author who makes a living from writing, and he wants to make enough to continue his hobby of painting (so he confesses). Like Calder, he hitch-hikes by aeroplane around Northern Canada (authors doing this must surely outnumber the local mosquitoes). So he writes a book about the Eskimo, a well-written book, an interesting book, but oh! one has read it so often before, and done so much better. ‘It’s all about the noble savage and the dastardly white culture, while scorn is heaped on the Missions to whom cardPlaying is a sin. It’s all well-deserved, of course, but none of it is new, and Wyatt doesn’t really convince us that he’s doing anything more than writing a good book; the flame of inner convic. tion doesn’t light up.

ihere may have been more remarkable Norwegians than Nansen, but if so I haven’t heard of them. His daighter writes a movingly frank and realistic biography of him. He was a strange figure to his daughter, godlike yet human, remote and austere, yet suddenly full of schoolboyish charm. I must confess I hadn’t realised the vital part that Nansen played in the separation of Norway from a reluctant Sweden, and the story of the tense negotiations is a fascinating one. Nansen’s preoccupation with the Arctic, which was a field of research to him and not just a field of adventure, contrasts’ oddly with his marriage with the beautiful singer Eva Sars, and the strain and almost break-up of the martriage emerge, though not quite clearly, in the daughter’s story. It is a pity that Nansen’s second marriage is barely mentioned; one would have liked to have heard more of it. .

Nansen’s great work for refugees in the League of Nations, however, is described from the personal angle. The extraordinary man over-rode nations and governments when people were at stake, but the casual mention of official blunder after official blunder makes one sick in the stomach at the folly of mankind. It is sad reading. This is the kind of book I might imagine the daughter of an earlier Viking like Eric the Red might have written, of a father with his eyes on far lands and his head in clouds of thought, his mind and his fingers busy with a thousand and one tasks, but unable to see that a 17-year-old girl needs more than one dress,