Excessive Candour
In the Belly of the Thing

No reader who has begun to get used to the literatures of the early 21st century should be flummoxed by the strangeness of The Terror, which seems to be an historically exact recounting of the famous doomed Arctic expedition led by the ineffably stupid Sir John Franklin (1786-1847), who caused the deaths of 130 men in his attempt to find the Northwest Passage by force, but which is something else entirely. The Terror is not only a story about white men not getting the point of the world, it is also a story about the wrongness of a certain kind of story.

For there is no way to understand Franklin's insane blundering assault against the arctic ice north of mainland Canada, nor the "supernatural" intensity of the experience of dying there of cold at the top of the world, as a simple narrative whose terminus is mundanely inevitable. The story of the Franklin expedition is not inherently a realistic story—not a tale that can plausibly be told within the framework of a conventional mimetic narrative process, despite the 650 pages Simmons spends seeming to obey the demands of "realism." Because The Terror is not a goosed documentary; it is far truer than that. It is a fable.

We begin in medias res, where meaning begins, six months after Franklin has finally died, in one of the two ships stranded inextricably in the ice because he refused to listen to reason about what was facing the expedition. We are in the point of view of Capt. Francis Crozier, a competent man banned from further promotion by the fact that he is of Irish birth, and quite clearly—Simmons seems not to be titivating the historical record here—the only one of Franklin's officers who might have saved the expedition. But it is too late now. Neither ship, Terror or Erebus, is going to survive.

Crozier is drunk; over and above his inner knowledge that he cannot save his men, two strangenesses bother him: the tongueless Inuit girl known as Lady Silence, whose arrival and presence remain a mystery and a threat to the composure of the crew, and the continued depredations of "the thing," a shape-changing monster that—like (he thinks) some nightmare exfoliation of the essence of the "evil" represented by the carnivorous polar bears, who are themselves almost unkillable—has been savagely dismembering anyone out of sight in the ice for more than a minute or so.

Many 21st-century readers—most of whom pretty well assume nowadays that any new tale of the fantastic set upon this planet will invoke dozens of earlier tales, whole moraines of quotes and hints and jokes out of the cauldron of echoes—will immediately identify "the thing" as an echo of the Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks film The Thing From Another World (1951), as well as the story it is taken from, John W. Campbell Jr.'s "Who Goes There?" (1938, Astounding). They will not have needed Simmons' help—he dedicates The Terror to almost the entire cast and crew of the film—to make the fix; it is a sign, however, of the kind of reader Simmons expects to attract—someone familiar with the fantastic in literature, which is to say a paradigm early-21st-century reader—that he does not actually name the film. He assumes, rightly, that we'll probably know.

Falling victim to the wrong story

Where Crozier is wrong about the thing is his assumption that it is like something else. Crozier is still what one might call a victim of the wrong story, and he will not be able to save himself in any sense before he abandons, as it were, the mimetic tradition as applied to the para-mimetic exorbitance of the genuinely extreme, of a set of experiences that stretch mimesis beyond the breaking point. To treat the long death of Franklin and the men he kills north of the Arctic Circle in "realistic" terms is to tell the wrong story; it is to misshape the true historical fable, and it is utterly to miss the underlying drama of The Terror, which is not the 600-page drama of the long excruciation of innocent men until they die of cold or thing, for the terror that shapes this astonishingly readable novel is something else.

If we are to take literally everything that happens, we need to think of ourselves as inhabiting another kind of story. It is a tale of wrongness—the sort of wrongness that, in a novel of the fantastic, augurs and manifests an amnesia about the true nature of the world. Franklin and his officers—even the supple-minded Crozier at the start of things, before he begins to learn the score—are not simply white men who don't get the point, though it is blindingly clear that their contemptous and culture-bound refusal to adopt any of the techniques the Inuit use to survive in the far North constitutes a fatal failure to get a very practical point, that you cannot make the world do your bidding by bullying it. But that's not the whole of it. What the white men of The Terror also manifest is another, far more terrible and terminal fact, a 21st-century fact, that maybe you can't make the world do your bidding by bullying it, but you can certainly kill the world trying to.

Simmons spends a lot of time killing off his cast—and doing a superlatively researched, superlatively vivid job of detailing the ways it is possible and necessary to die of inhuman cold—while at the same time making it possible to understand the evisceration of his cast as a modeling and foretelling of the fate of the white race in history. But that, with all due respect to the integrity of mind and will required to create the first 650 pages of The Terror, does not move the reader much beyond what one might call a kinetic response to vividly represented experience. What translates The Terror into a fable of the fantastic—into a novel capable of shaping its contemporary readers' take on the shape of the world—is what happens to Crozier after he becomes the sole survivor of the deadly farce of the West.

He has been shot up savagely by the most degenerate members of the crew, who then die at the behest of the shape-changer thing, whom we almost think Simmons may be treating as a metaphor of our state, like the monster in Forbidden Planet (1956), esemplastic of our illness. But we learn different. Through a sequence of narrative segues, we find ourselves in an Inuit universe. Lady Silence has rescued Crozier, brought him back to life, but a different life: Through shared dreams, and example, and persistence, she rebirths him as an inhabitant of the true world, the world of the Inuit, the "Real People," which is under terrible threat.

The white man is the true terror

She is herself tongueless because she is a God-Walker, a spirit mediator between humans and the "God Who Walks Like a Man," who is not a "thing" but a principle of balance. And the true story of The Terror—its true terror—suddenly lies clear on the page: The terror of the book is the insufficiency of the God as a balance as the white man, the kabloona, bullies his way through the delicate world, icebreaking it. As the Inuit prophetic lore had long foretold it:

when the Tuunbaq's [the God's] domain was finally invaded by the pale people—the kabloona—it would be the beginning of the End of Times. Poisoned by the kabloonas' pale souls, the Tuunbaq would sicken and die. The Real People would forget their ways and their language. Their homes would be filled with drunkenness and despair ... and the Real People would lose their good dreams.

When the Tuunbaq dies because of the kabloona sickness, the spirit-govenriors-of-the-sky knew, its cold, white domain will begin to heat and melt and thaw. The white bears will have no ice for a home, so their cubs will die. ... The birds will wheel in circles and cry to the Raven for help, their breeding grounds gone.

This is the future they saw.

Crozier becomes a God-Walker with Lady Silence, who has become his wife. He returns to his ship, the Terror, which is dead, haunted by "the kind of unhealthy ghost-spirits that haunted a bad place," and leaves, abandons it forever.

The Terror is we cannot.