The Terror (Audio)

by Dan Simmons

read by John Lee

(Santa Ana: Books on Tape, 2007)

MP3 Audiobook, 2.65 GB, 28¼ Hours, Fiction

ISBN: 9781415937136, US$45.95

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: The men on board HMS Terror have every expectation of triumph. As part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage, they are as scientifically supported an enterprise as has ever set forth. As they enter a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, though, they are stranded on a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. But their real enemy is far more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror constantly clawing to get in.

My Review: Over the summer, we moved our family from the high desert of Utah to the rainy and green Pacific Northwest so that I could attend grad school at Western Washington University. This Fall has been, after a couple of years spent in Utah, very cold and rainy for us and has required us to get re-acclimated to the weather here. As the year comes to a close, it has also been getting much darker much earlier and staying darker for most of the day (I don’t remember that happening from our time living in Seattle). By 4:00 most of the light is out of the sky. I have also taken up walking to and from the bus stop to get to campus, and so have been out in the elements much more than when I was commuting back and forth to work and school in Utah. Enter into that mélange of circumstances me listening to Dan Simmons’ novel The Terror about arctic explorers trapped at the top of the world where the cold never ends and the sun doesn’t last long in the sky.

Listening to The Terror was, for me, a whole body experience.

Granted, Bellingham is not nearly as cold as the waters and ice north of Canada below the North Pole, but in terms of sensory experiences, it was very intense listening to Lee’s narration as I walked through the rain and wind and dark (we’ve had some bad storms the last months).

What I didn’t know until I looked it up is that this is what could be termed as “Creative Historical Fiction.” The 1845 Franklin Expedition really did exist and really did go missing by 1848, and no one really knows definitively what happened to the men of the search for the Northwest Passage (though evidence suggests that cold, starvation, scurvy, pneumonia, tuberculosis and lead poisoning all contributed to the Expedition’s failure). You can read more about it HERE and HERE. (There is a “roster” of the ships’ men HERE complete with pictures of some of the men, though I have to admit that with the exception of John Franklin, I didn’t image any of the men in my head to look like their actual photos. I saw Captain Crozier as more of a bearded Russell Crowe type and Dr. Goodsir as a kind of bespectacled William H. Macy. Cornelius Hickey (the villain of the piece) was Clint Howard. Of course, that would be my ideal casting if this were to be played out on the silver screen, rounded out by Mizou Peck as Lady Silence, though who would be Captain Franklin? Bob Hoskins, maybe, and if he were still alive, Heath Ledger would have made a great Lt. John Irving.)

But I digress…

What Simmons’ has done, then, is take this “Lost” Expedition and filled in the blanks surrounding the disappearance of the men of the Discovery Force. He has done this mostly through a series of supernatural occurrences that center around Iñupiat mythology, which—as far as I can tell—is more or less accurate … Simmons has taken some liberties with the tuunbaq, but as far as that goes, how do you accurately portray a mythological evil spirit demon? (Though, after all, Simmons is—at heart—a writer in the horror genre, so the supernatural and extreme violence aspects of the book are to be expected.)

Anyway, I was completely taken by this novel. It is so terribly engrossing that I could not get enough of it and would sometimes even extend my walk home in order to listen to it that much longer. Simmons does such a wonderful job of getting human emotion onto the page and creating such believable literary characters out of the actual people that were on the Franklin Expedition (my personal favorites were Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier (captain of HMS Terror) and Dr. Harry D.S. Goodsir, who really comes into his own by the end of the novel). You just love to hate the evil ones (especially Caulker’s Mate Cornelius Hickey) and really sympathize with those “heroes” of the novel. Though, I have to keep reminding myself that what Simmons’ has done with these real people is made them fit the arc of his novel, rather than accurately portray their true personalities. There is nothing to suggest that John Franklin was incompetent or that Cornelius Hickey was a vicious little man or that any of the others were portrayed in the way they were. What Simmons has done is created fictional representations of these men, but what a fiction it is!

The Terror is one part Moby-Dick mixed with one part Jurassic Park and one part Jaws and mixed liberally with “To Build a Fire.” It really is quite a novel, and even when Simmons takes a departure from the narrative of the Franklin Expedition and the fate of its men and takes a turn into Iñupiat mythology to explain some of the more supernatural events of the novel, it doesn’t derail entirely (though the environmental message about polar bears and melting arctic ice that is snuck in there does seem somewhat contrived) and it comes to a satisfying end, for me at least.

And yet, even though Simmons tells an amazing and engrossing tale, what made The Terror an even more incredible experience was narrator John Lee. I don’t know where he has been hiding for my audiobook listening career, but he is a true gem among audiobook readers, easily the equal of such greats as Frank Muller and Jim Dale.

All-in-all Dan Simmons’ The Terror is an excellent audiobook experience, and one I would highly recommend.

Another review of The Terror (though in print form, not audio) can be found at At Home with Books.