Review: Dark Matter
/
3 stars. Chills upon chills. This book is one long anxiety attack, from page one. Such a well-formed story - one that I will probably never read again. Michelle Paver is incredibly talented for taking such a fleshed out (initially unlikeable) character and dropping him exactly where he needed to go for our own sick sense of scared shitless entertainment. I for one had full body freak-outs, which didn't happen when I read Dark Matter's sister books (The Terror and The North Water, unnoficial sister status assigned by yours truly). But holy cow does arctic desperation really feel like coming home, for me. Man versus something-out-there-in-the-cold-darkness is my happy place.
It's a lot simpler than the other two. This is a very narrow story - and the POV journal format is clever as it only emphasizes the isolation and claustrophobia experienced by the protagonist. Four men set out to "winter over" in the Arctic, intending to conduct a scientific expedition collecting measurements and instrument readings about the weather, ice, etc. Due to circumstances almost too unlucky to be believed, our main character ends up there alone, determined to carry on the expedition without the rest of the team. But (yyyessssssss): is he truly alone?
It probably goes without saying at this point that a lot of my anxiety stemmed from the dog situation. Hell with Jack, I was sick to my stomach out of fear and worry for them at every point - even the non-scary parts. Every time one of them was mentioned or involved I could barely bring myself to turn the page. That type of fear is not my favorite but I won't dock a star per usual because I didn't do my homework ahead of time and didn't check trigger warnings. Plus, it ends out okay, sort of. But ugh. Not fun.
Still, I could not put this down - I finished it in two days and read the final chapters in a breathless panic. I learned to really root for Jack in the end - guess being haunted in the Arctic really changes you. I'm a huge sucker for things like this:
"And yet I think I now understand the impulse which drives men to shoot bears. It isn't for the pelt or the meat or the sport - or not only those things. I think they need to do it. They need to kill that great Arctic totem to give them some sense of control over the wilderness - even if that is only an illusion.”
And there's another quote I'm too lazy to find where Jack muses that the reason why men try to measure and read environments like the Arctic is just a way of trying to grapple with its intense strangeness, or isolation, or something along those lines; all futile efforts anyhow, because it's essentially unknowable. Not to get too cosmic, but here we are.
Anyway, I liked it. Reminds me a bit of Jennifer McMahon, except that it leans a little more toward Sarah Waters and is a little more male?