BOOKS | REVIEWS: To the Bright Edge of the World

To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey;
To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey;

What's with Alaska?

The smaller our lives become, the larger our biggest state looms. It grabs hold of the American mind as final frontier and enduring reminder of our vanished past, nostalgically envisioned as a time and place where we might stand up and discover who we are, unimpeded by mediating technology, modern snark and narrowing horizons.

Last month, Dave Eggers' "Heroes of the Frontier" used Alaska as backdrop for a 21st century exploration involving a mother and her children finding themselves.

This month, Alaskan Eowyn Ivey has returned to the setting of her "The Snow Child" (2012) with a second novel set in Alaska before statehood: "To the Bright Edge of the World." Inspired by an actual 1885 expedition into unmapped Alaskan territory, it continues a long line of American fiction in which the wilderness tests our rationalist assumptions involving how the world works and what it contains.

Expedition leader Col. Allen Forrester is filled with such assumptions as he lights out from Portland, Ore., leaving behind the recently married Sophie, his pregnant wife.

But even in this novel's early pages, it's clear that Forrester pays attention to what he sees, regardless of whether it conforms with what he expects. As his great-nephew indicates to a museum curator on the novel's opening page, there's a marked disconnect between Forrester's official reports and those private journal entries the nephew describes as "downright fantastical."

In the months to come, Forrester and his men find themselves bedeviled by a shamanistic Indian oldster, alive for at least a century and described as The Man Who Flies. They'll be accompanied for portions of their trip by an Indian woman who insists that the pelt she wears was once the skin of her husband, capable of morphing into an otter. They'll make their way across a lake inhabited by a toothy monster, representing a primordial, hitherto unknown species.

Are such phenomena real? Or the deliriously feverish dreams of hungry, exhausted and sick men, moving through a harsh land they don't know and often fear?

Ivey avoids answering this question, for all her obvious willingness to blur the lines distinguishing what we believe from what we see. She's more interested in tacitly asking why we're so insistent on drawing such lines in the first place-and exploring all the ways those divisions restrict our relations with the natural world, filled with wonders undreamed of in our daily lives.

Forrester's efforts to see further align well with Sophie, true daughter of a mad artist whose sculptures had sought to make stones speak and animals talk.

Sophie's art involves photography; while Forrester is away in Alaska, she bides her time practicing her craft, taking pictures of birds while learning, much as her husband does, that every attempt to describe what she sees is bound to be partial. Par for the course, in a novel offering multiple portraits of women like Sophie, aware they're themselves perceived partially by the men around them.

Much of Ivey's novel toggles between these married journal writers, with additional snippets that include diary entries featuring Forrester's two fellow soldiers, invented newspaper articles, an obstetrician's manual and the correspondence between Forrester's descendant and the curator, commenting on the pages we've read while telling us a bit about themselves.

Much of this material has a museum-like quality to it. True to her thematic focus on the partiality of our vision, Ivey approaches her material with so much respect and such attention to detail that it often fails to breathe. A reader's trek through Ivey's pages can therefore double what Forrester and his fatigued men frequently feel, as they slog forward.

But both reader and Forrester's crew also experience the imaginative phenomena I've described above (and others like it). Making good on what Ivey's title promises, they take us to the edge of the world and the heart of Alaska, challenging us to see the mystery in everyday life.

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