Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard Book

Cherry indicates that Sara Wheeler's love affair with Antarctica shows no signs of diminishing. After the success of Terra Incognita, her story of seven months in the Antarctic, she has now turned her attentions to a biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the surviving members of Scott's ill-starred South Pole expedition and the author of one of the few truly enduring works of Polar literature, The Worst Journey in the World. Wheeler's achievement here is to transcend her subject's limitations to search for his nobility of spirit. The portrait that emerges is of a man tortured by his internal contradictions. Cherry-Garrard was a conservative of the old school, a gentleman amateur brought up to believe in the divine right of the aristocracy. But this view was shot through with a curious modernism; much as he deplored the ever-growing demands of the working class, he still recognised their right to a better quality of life. Similarly, he found himself out of step with many of his class over the futility of the war, and yet he suffered from guilt and anxiety over his inability to participate due to invalidity. The Worst Journey in the World was his crowning moment. Where most Polar books focused on the practicalities of sledging rations, Cherry-Garrard looked beyond that into the souls of the explorers. It was an approach that has guaranteed his place in literature, but it cost him dear. Throughout his life, he was riddled with doubts about the part he played. Should he have disobeyed Scott's orders and taken supplies further south? And had he done so would the Polar party have survived. Likewise, his desire to tell the truth about the failings of the expedition was counterbalanced by his sense of loyalty. Ultimately, too, one suspects it was his inability to resolve all these ongoing conflicts that made it so hard for him to maintain lasting relationships with women until much later in life and contributed to the severe depression that dogged his middle and old age. If one wants to find fault with Cherry, it is in Wheeler's fundamentalist approach to her art. She praises Cherry-Garrard for the scope of his own work, yet limits herself to her sources. Inevitably this means that his early life is glossed over, but perhaps more importantly she sometimes denies herself the opportunities to speculate about states of mind or to make connections the reader is crying out for her to make. But maybe, she would argue that the point is better made when the reader does the work. Either way, this is a fine book. There is a growing market for Polar literature and much of what is being published is either a rehash of other people's work or mediocre. Cherry is neither, and Wheeler can rest easy that this book can take its place alongside the 1921 tome that inspired it. --John CraceRead More