Here this book hits a challenge of its own. Told second-hand, crunching through the ice simply isn’t very interesting: just one agonising, storm-crushed, sled-dragging step after another until the job is done. There’s little reflection on the pointlessness of a journey which starts from one base and ends, after much frigid hell, at another, or of the psychological weirdness of being able to phone home every night from nowhere.
