Beryl Bainbridge's Birthday Boys

Categories: Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Fiction

Remember Frank Hurley’s spectacular photographs from the Shackleton expedition to the Antarctic, where the utter clarity of the light on the ice around the captive ship makes every detail seem truer than life? 

I always think of those photos when I reread Beryl Bainbridge’s novel The Birthday Boys, about another Antarctic voyage, Scott’s ill-fated 1910-12 race to the South Pole.  The crisp perfection of Bainbridge’s writing and her sharp, utterly clear-eyed attitude toward her characters and their venture seem to match perfectly the crystalline quality of those photos.  

Each of the five sections of the novel is told by one of the men selected for the final, doomed leg of Scott’s journey—doomed both to failure (the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen got to the pole first) and to death for all five. 

One by one, they recount the events that bring them to the final camp, tantalizingly short of their resupply depot on the return journey from the pole, where cold, hunger, and exhaustion claim their lives. 

It’s a tragic story, and Bainbridge tells it poignantly and sympathetically.  But she never loses sight of what a folly the enterprise was from the start—an ill-thought-out piece of empire-building and (at least in Bainbridge’s eyes) gentleman-amateur, Boy’s Own juvenility.

With very few words, Bainbridge is able to give a startlingly vivid sense of the journey’s spectacular hardships and beauties.  You won’t be able to read her novel without a chill, for more than one reason.