Fatal Fiasco

By R.Z. Sheppard

The facts are these: in 1910 British navy Captain Robert Falcon Scott set out on his second expedition to Antarctica. Studying penguins was important, but there was also the urgency of beating the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen to the South Pole. The British brought motorized sleds and shaggy ponies but not enough dog teams. The sleds and horses soon broke down. On Jan. 18, 1912, Scott and four companions finally dragged themselves to the bottom of the world, where they found a month-old note from Amundsen. On the way back the runners-up had to fight fatigue, blizzards and temperatures low enough to splinter their teeth. Nobody finished. Only five miles from safety, Scott was among the last to die.

It is hard to retell this story without commonplaces about the sporting British and their plucky amateurism. In her new novel The Birthday Boys (Carroll & Graf; 189 pages; $18.95), Beryl Bainbridge imagines the icebound band as the last gentlemen of the Edwardian Age. After them the deluge: two world wars, a lost generation and a crumbling empire.

Read in this context, Bainbridge's Scott is less than heroic. The novel is based on historical records, but the dialogue, descriptions and thematic patterning bear the author's elegant stamp. Her Antarctica glitters and inspires: outcrops of jet-black rock kept bald by constant winds; prismatic ice masses shot with rose, blue and violet. As Scott and the other explorers recall their experiences, they foreshadow larger events. The dinner parties and official send-offs suggest a fatal national overconfidence. Scott's sensuous, assured wife already has one lively foot in the jazz age. In a hemisphere where seasons are reversed, birthdays and Christmas hint at endings rather than beginnings. Sailing south in summer heat, the men sleep on top of the ship's ice locker.

"In the end it may well be every man for himself, but in the beginning it has to be every man for another," says Scott, whom Bainbridge has perfectly positioned between the hopes of the 19th century and the disillusionments of the 20th.