Adventure

The prompt for September’s Love Blippin’ Books challenge (#LBB21) is ‘Adventure.’

For me, this immediately connected with Willard Price’s Adventure series. This was one of my favourite series between the ages of seven and thirteen, which seems like a short period of time but was sufficient for, from memory, three or four re-reads. I’d recently been reminded,  while plodding away logging my entire library and reading history on LibraryThing,  that I’d never read the final, fourteenth volume in the series, ‘Arctic Adventure’, which didn’t appear in paperback until 1982, some years after the rest of the books.

The central premise of the series is that teenagers Hal and Roger Hunt travel to different parts of the world capturing wild animals alive for zoos. Mainly written in the fifties and sixties (I read them in the seventies) they project an anti-hunting, ostensibly conservation ethos, but without really problematising the ethical issues around capture and display of wild animals. As the latter is something that has engaged me in my activist and scholarly life, I was a little intrigued as to how these books, so important to me as a boy, sit against the values that I developed in adulthood.

In ‘Arctic Adventure’ Hal and Roger visit Greenland, Canada and Alaska, collecting a different animal and defying death in each chapter. My adult eye now sees that these stories and adventures are principally a medium for the delivery of facts about nature and geography, and to a lesser degree culture. What was disappointing was how crushingly badly written this volume was, with zero emotional intelligence in relation to the hardships and near death experiences that the characters are put through, and frankly the ridiculous ease with which animals are captured or tamed. Of course, that is probably not what you are after when you are seven. On the plus side, the portrayal of indigenous peoples, albeit all lumped together as ‘Eskimos,’ is almost entirely sympathetic, apart from the author’s obvious assertion for science and modernity over indigenous tradition and belief.  

What I can see is that books like this will have fed my curiosity about different parts of the world and about wildlife, and probably played a part in steering my academic interests toward Geography and Environmental Studies, and I made a career out of that. Also, they helped ignite and perpetuate my love of reading.

Coincidentally, at the tail end of last month, I read a real-life, historic Arctic adventure. Andrea Pitzer’s ‘Icebound’ recounts the Arctic exploration of William Barents. In particular, it recounts the events of 1596/7 when the expedition’s ship became icebound, and the ‘survival story’ (although not of Barents) of getting through that winter in and the return, in small open boats, back to the Netherlands.  This was a story that I didn’t know much about, and Pitzer tells it very well from surviving first hand accounts, but also contextualising it with the science, culture and geopolitics of the time. Recommended.

Perhaps the most telling connection, and difference between the two books lies in the portrayal of polar bears. For the sixteenth century Dutch, the bears were an almost elemental force that threatened life and limb throughout - kill or be killed. For Hal and Roger, despite accurately conveying the characteristics of the species, they somehow manage to tame/befriend one in the opening chapter, and ‘Nanook’ goes on to defend them from harm and help them capture other species. 

Many thanks to @squatbetty for convening Love Blippin’ Books for the best part of two years. It looks like it will be coming to a close now, but I quite enjoy occasional posts about my reading, so I’ll keep doing that in some shape or form.