Everland review a compelling tale of lives stripped bare in Antarctica

An Antarctic island gives up its secrets at a price in Rebecca Hunt's fine evocation of extreme endurance in 1913 and 2013

Rebecca Hunt's fiction dramatises the tension between private turmoil and the self that must meet the public gaze. Her first novel, Mr Chartwell , explored the ways in which Winston Churchill's "black dog" of depression coexisted with wartime leadership, when Churchill's every word and gesture became signifiers of national mood. Pungently animal and intent upon its human prey, the black dog eats its way into Churchill's life. Anyone familiar with depression will recognise the intimate horror of a mind colonised by it. The comedy is grim, as is the exhausted gallantry of Churchill's resistance.

For the ground of her new novel, Everland, Hunt has chosen Antarctica. Explorers, like war leaders, sometimes succeed or fail by the tiniest of margins, and every detail of their expeditions is pulled apart by history. The early Antarctic explorers, more than any others, were urged on by the public appetite for glory. The polar climate's pitiless ability to expose any slight error and reward it with death caught the imaginations of millions. The vision of small figures in a white wasteland heading with their sledges towards the ultimate south symbolised not only human vulnerability, but also a daring that snapped its fingers at risk.

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