Dark Matter by Michelle Paver.
It's that time of year again, The snow has started to fall, small cherub-faced children grin under bobble hats, time to curl up by your electric heater (loathe to turn the central heating on yet) and scare yourself shitless this winter night. The British Winter Tradition of the novella subtitled 'A Ghost Story' is an ancient ritual of, oh, about a year and a half. Wrestled successfully from long-dead Edwardian males like M.R. James, and Henry James' Turn Of The Screw (a masterpiece of the form), the traditional ghost story is now firmly in the hands of talented bestselling female authors, and frankly that's no bad thing.
2010 seems to be the year for it. We've had the applauded and Booker-prize nominated (not to mention fellow Pembrokeshirian*) Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger, Audrey 'Time Traveller's Wife' Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry and the arch-duchess, woman in black of the genre herself, Susan Hill release her fourth ghost-novella The Small Hand, which has rocketed into the charts this November.
My read this winter was Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, originally a writer of worthy but formulaic family sagas, she eventually made her name with the children's series The Chronicles Of Ancient Darkness, anthropological fantasies in the tradition of Golding's The Inheritors or the books of Jean M. Auel. This year she released Dark Matter: A Ghost Story, a chilling yarn set on the arctic ice in the mid 30s, with the obligatory subtitle and tons of atmosphere.
It takes the form of the diary of destitute Londoner Jack Miller, poor, bitter and boiling over with middle-class anxieties and an unconscious death-wish that practically reaches out of the pages and smacks you in the face. An aspiring physicist, Jack is hired as a radio operator for a group of priviliged boy's own types for a lengthy scientific trek to Spitsbergen, a group of islands in the Arctic circle. Once a profitable no-mans land, Spitsbergen has now been annexed by Norway - leaving a scattering of disused miner's camps and trapper's huts throughout the snowy wastes. Once the party arrive at their camp and settle in for the six-month sunless night, it becomes apparent, to Jack at least, that they are far from alone.
There is a yarn element to all these ghost stories, the inevitable feeling that you are being spun a tale. The trick is to go with it and enjoy the ride. Paver's characters are believable, humanly flawed and sympathetic. The setting is individually Gothic - the brooding castle ruins replaced by the remains of 20th century industrial endeavour, and the excuse for her character(s) to exist within a perfectly Earthly eternal night is too good of a chance to miss. Also, for a female writer, she has an embarrassingly solid grasp on what makes these boy's adventures so indulgently fun. Building huts, surviving from rations, using a mix of scientific and practical knowledge to keep yourself alive and comfortable in an inhospitable environment. These are the hidden joys of the majority of male fiction, from Tintin to Mad Max and boy does Paver nail it.
But this is a ghost story, and chilling it is. All bases are touched here, visceral histories, isolation, attempted tragic rationality at all levels, the feeling of being powerless in a chaotic and unexplained universe. Most of all though, the very palatable and real irrational terror of staring straight into the face of a person who is not meant to be there, and being frozen to the spot. This is a frightening book, a clever ghost tale - proper nightmare fodder. Give some texture to those bad dreams this winter.
*not a real word
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