FICTION

THE TERRORS OF ICE AND DARKNESS by Christoph Ransmayr , translated from the German by John E. Woods (Grove Weidenfeld: $18.95; 240 pp.) . During the Imperial Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition of 1873-74, blood flows sluggishly in men’s veins, and the rum they drink to fend off the cold is as “viscous as whale oil.” At 80 degrees latitude, during the four-month winter night, emotions lie frozen, only rarely erupting like pack ice squeezed by its own expansion, groaning and splintering into jagged outcrops.

Christoph Ransmayr (“The Last World”) has written a curious novel that conveys the distancing, the numbness, of Arctic experience by clothing the story of that expedition in two layers of fiction. A nameless narrator in Vienna becomes obsessed with the disappearance of an Italian acquaintance, Josef Mazzini, on the Spitsbergen islands in 1981. Mazzini, a descendant of one of the 19th-Century explorers, is obsessed with following their route to the barren archipelago they discovered: Kaiser Franz Josef Land.

The narrator remains a cipher, Mazzini a mystery. All we get are their observations of the present-day region and their notes on the often tragic history of polar exploration. The most fully developed characters are the imperial commanders, Carl Weyprecht and Julius Payer, and the deepest insights about them come from their own journals. Intrepid men, they were also fine writers, poets as well as scientists.

Ransmayr tells this story dispassionately; the story itself is ironic. The success of the Weyprecht-Payer expedition has little to do with the suffering that the men endure. Their ship, locked in the ice, is carried by wind and current to within sight of the new land. Their attempt to return to Europe on foot seems doomed until a fortuitous thaw lets them use the lifeboats they have dragged with them. Their goals are scientific, but the Austrian public lionizes them mainly for planting the flag.

In the end, none of this matters. The basic Jack London stuff remains as compelling as ever. Ransmayr’s real protagonist is obsession itself, the call of the wild, the “undertow that has its source in the emptiness, timelessness, and tranquillity of this wasteland and that takes each of its victims . . . from the warm security of a well-ordered life into silence, cold, ice.”