SOUTH POLE STATION

Fiction

Like a polar strip mall

SOUTH POLE STATION

By Ashley Shelby

356 pp. Picador

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

Odd questions arose as I read this novel. Is it a farce? A love story? A true reflection of life among Polies? Has Ashley Shelby herself spent a sojourn at the bottom of the earth? Do they really call themselves Polies?

And then, is this a polemic about political meddling in science? About global warming? And whose side is Shelby on?

Part of the problem is the shifting tone of the book. There’s humor: the Polies are an irreverent, wise-acre bunch – there’s tragedy: the heroine has a secret mission to bury her dead brother’s ashes at 90˚ south – there’s sex: though the Polies hook up readily, they have rules about who’s taken and who’s not – there’s sociological study of interactions in a closely packed group; there’s unapologetic drinking; there’s scientific speculation; there’s politics of the nastiest kind.

Regarding Question Number 4, Shelby says in her afterword that her middle sister, Lacy Shelby, “is one of only a handful of women in history who have wintered over at South Pole Station.” Their father, the author hints, is a devotee of Antarctic literature. It would seem that Ashley Shelby has read and researched widely and concocted a story loosely based on her sister’s experience, with the caveat that “what happens on the ice stays on the ice.” She warns those who know the turf that the place she describes was decommissioned in 2008, and that she has played fast and loose with some timelines and some descriptions.

Her protagonist, Cooper (a female) is an artist, a painter permitted to go to the pole under an artists and writers grant from the National Science Foundation. She finds herself among a colorful array of scientists (“Beakers”) and construction crew (“Nailheads”), who practice mutual contempt and cliquish exclusion not unlike that of high school students. Among them is a hunky astrophysicist, Sal, who is pursuing research to prove or disprove his outlier theory of the origin of the universe.

Into the mix arrives Frank, a discredited theorist who advocates Intelligent Design and denies climate change. The Beakers ostracize him, deny him access to data he wants, refuse to let him use the ice corer he needs. They can’t understand why a Denier (this would read better if it were spelled Deny-er) is permitted to work among serious scientists. Frank coolly maintains that science should be open to all points of view. What has really happened is that a pair of conservative Congressmen, up for re-election, want to create headlines by threatening to close the American research station at the pole. Big Oil is behind it all, happy to introduce skepticism about global warming.

Sal muses about why people believe the deniers: “Deniers provide hope. We don’t. We’re doom and gloom.” 

The Denier Frank works his way around protocol, cons Cooper into acting as his assistant, tries to get his ice core. Instead he causes a gruesome accident. The uproar evokes headlines and indeed does bring South Pole Station to the brink of extinction.

A former editor at Penguin, Shelby writes in a free-wheeling style that wavers between ironic wit and unfortunate analogies. She does an awesome job of describing the indescribable, the landscape (which, perhaps, she has never actually seen?): At the door of the airplane, newly arrived Cooper “stopped short, holding up the rest of the line as she stared into infinity – sheer white, of a character she had never seen in life or art…All around her was a landscape of snow without end; there was no horizon. She felt seaborne, bodiless. There was no edge, no crust to hold it all in.”

Then Shelby destroys her cred with wince-inducing phrases like “a pelvic exam of the mind,” “schizophrenic madness that boldly announced itself one day like a Mary Kay saleswoman,” “the psychologist surveyed Cooper as if she were a thrift store evening gown,” “the American polar station set on the hairy fringes of Antarctica.” I believe they are meant as humor, but they jar me. 

So much cleverer are the emails she and her sister exchange. Cooper writes to Billie:

I can only e-mail when the heavens and the satellites align, and the sword is in the stone. I’ve been here for eight hours, and have already lost all sense of time. It’s strange down here. Like a strip mall at the end of the earth. There are only nine women. When winter starts in March, there will be four. I’m told that while the odds are good, the goods are odd. The guy at the computer next to me is starting to get really excited – like, bordering on sexually excited – by a cat video...

As my questions untangled and Shelby’s bizarre similes dwindled, I concluded this book is probably a pretty good reflection, after all, of what Polies and their lives are really like.

~

Once a journalist chasing facts for The Boston Globe, Marty Carlock finds it’s more fun to make things up. Her short fiction has appeared in a dozen-plus journals and quarterly publications. She’s author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston and several unpublished novels. She sometimes writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines.