Michelle Paver: Dark Matter (undated)

Our latest reading book was Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, a British novelist and well known children’s writer.

She was born in 1960 in Nyasaland (now Malawi) in central Africa to a Belgian mother and South African father.  Her family settled in Wimbledon, England, when she was three.  She was educated at Wimbledon High School, read biochemistry at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, attained a first class degree and became a partner in a City of London law firm. She left the firm to concentrate on her writing soon after her father died.

Interestingly, she didn’t tell anyone, except her agent, that she was writing a ghost story.  She wrote the first draft of Dark Matter in early summer, then tied the manuscript up in two metres of black ribbon and returned to it at Hallowe’en, to continue writing the book at the time when nights were lengthening and winter was coming on – the proper time to write ghost stories.

Dark Matter is a real ghost story, which not only describes the icy northern wastes but also the terror of a mind turning in on itself.  Briefly, it is 1937 and clouds of war are gathering over fog bound London.  Jack Miller is a lower-middle class failed academic, poor, lonely and with little future.  He embarks as a wireless operator on an Arctic expedition with three more privileged young men.  In high spirits, they leave Norway with three men and eight huskies and cross the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun.  Eventually they reach the remote uninhabited island where they will camp for the next year.  Gruhuken.  But the Arctic summer is brief.  As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels a creeping unease.  One by one, his companions are forced to leave.  He faces a stark choice: to stay or to go.  Soon he will see the last of the sun as the polar night engulfs the camp in months of darkness.  Soon he will reach the point of no return when the sea will freeze making escape impossible.  And Gruhuken is not uninhabited.  Jack is not alone.  Something walks out there in the dark.

The general opinion was that the book is an amazingly atmospheric piece of writing about the Arctic and its icy loneliness .   The description of the changing summer light to the complete and utter darkness was evocative and for most of us ghostly.  The relationships within the group were interesting but we would have liked to know more about them, particularly between Jack and the leader of the group, Gus.  Jack’s unease and sensitivity to sounds when each member gradually left the island was palpable, particularly as darkness descended totally.  Was the island really haunted or did he become paranoid and a victim of his own imagination?   There is no doubt he was terrified and, as becomes apparent, he was not the only one.  The other members of the group felt it but nobody talked to each other.  Why?  For fear of causing alarm?  And then there was one left in the utter, terrifying darkness.  Or was there?

On the whole, we all enjoyed the book and I think found it a particularly good ghost story – certainly it is one of the best I have read.

Diana Coulson