Originally appearing at: Endicott Studio

I have read a lot of young adult fiction while crafting my monthly column for Bookslut but Geraldine McCaughrean's The White Darkness completely surprised me. Mildly disturbing from the beginning, the story follows a teenaged Sym who ends up on a surprise trip to Antarctica with her polar obsessed Uncle Victor. The flaky uncle would raise red flags for anyone right away but it is Sym's self professed love for doomed Antarctic explorer Lawrence "Titus" Oates on page one that will give many readers pause. Plucky teenagers are practically required in YA novels but crushes on dead legendary explorers? That doesn't happen — ever. So even though the book travels into the territory of thriller classic it is the inclusion of Oates that elevates The White Darkness to a whole new level. McCaughrean isn't afraid to make her heroine a geek — a polar geek even — and for that I am mightily impressed.

Initially Sym is just like any other kid with a dead father, overwhelmed mother and rather pushy relative (who it turns out is really only a relative in that "old family friend" kind of way). Titus is her imaginary friend but even that makes some kind of sense; from her own reading she has known about his part in Robert Scott's final doomed South Pole expedition for quite awhile. But while watching DVDs of The Last Place on Earth alone one night she became captivated by the story, particularly one element of it. "And there, at the heart of it, was Captain Oates; so sublimely beautiful that his image passed clean through my retina and scorched itself on my brain." Sym and Oates were an inseparable "couple" from that point on.

Interestingly enough, McCaughrean was impressed by the television program and sought out the actor who portrayed Oates. "Thanks to the video," she explained to me, "I was already making use of his 1986 good looks and amazingly sexy voice. His voice has not changed, and he has considerable charm. Of such things is fiction made."

In many ways Titus Oates was far more than just a member of Scott's 1910 expedition — he is the ultimate symbol of everything noble and selfless about the British Empire. In The Frozen Ship, Sarah Moss's fascinating look at history and myth surrounding polar exploration, Scott, whose death was widely reported in 1913, was ". . .an iconic figure for an England desperate to persuade the brightest and best to leave their work, their studies and their families for the near certainty of death on the battlefields of southern France." Even into the 1980s, she writes, British schools were teaching that ". . .the deceitful foreigner [Roald] Amundsen had used dishonourable means to stop the noble English Scott from reaching the South Pole first. . ." Scott's high mythic status elevated Oates as well, particularly as recorded by Scott, Oates sacrificed himself in an attempt to save his fellow explorers. He famously lifted his dying self from their tent and stated, "I am just going outside and may be some time," before disappearing into a blizzard. Unfortunately for the surviving members there was nothing that could save them but Scott still recorded Oates final words in his journal thus preserving them forever. As Moss explains, " 'I may be some time' has become a catchphrase of Englishness, so widely known as to be the title of Frances Spufford's book on polar exploration, subtitled, Ice and the English Imagination."

Spufford's book was well known to McCaughrean who recounts that he believes the British are obsessed with Scott's last journey because "as we read it we travel with him all the way to Death only to discover that we are still alive at the end but with a greater sense of the pricelessness and fragility of life." She has her own theories as to why Scott is so much better known than Amundsen, who actually made it to the South Pole first. "Why do I think Scott's expedition eclipsed Amundsen's? Because self–sacrifice was the order of the day. Because English–language media were more influential than Norwegian media. Because everyone on Scott's expedition kept a diary and, taken as a whole, there was something in there to appeal to everyone whereas Amundsen's diary is more matter–of–fact. Or is it because Scott and his men faced death in the way that every one of us would like to face it but we know we couldn't — with equanimity and heroism."

Easy enough to understand then why even in the 21st century a British kid like Sym would turn to Oates as her troubled family fell even more apart.

Sym's rather quirky affectation of "talking" to the explorer (something she knows enough to keep to herself), becomes of deadly importance after she and Uncle Victor embark on their Antarctic cruise. After their tour group finds itself in more and more dire circumstances, (all for very mysterious reasons) Victor reveals that he has long ago succumbed to a myth of his own. It turns out that Sym's know–it–all uncle is a follower of John Symmes's hollow Earth theory. (This revelation is when our heroine's name starts to make a horrible amount of sense.) Victor thinks there is a lot more going on underground in Antarctica than above and he is determined to prove it in a very big way. Sym finds herself literally dragged along for the ride as Victor maneuvers them further and further away from civilization looking for his hole in the ground. It is only Titus Oates who sticks with her, refusing to give up; it is only Oates who convinces Sym that survival is even possible.

McCaughrean knew exactly the sort of dynamic she was creating with these two personalities, particularly that of Sym, who represents all those teenagers who suffer while "being pursued by the massive bulldozer of peer–pressure." When the author was young she saw adolescence as ". . .a gymnasium for the emotions: a practice area rather than the sports field itself, where we learn to duck, dodge, catch and tackle all the huge emotions: hate, love, desire, passion, empathy, sympathy, hormonal flux, independence, interdependence, separateness, loneliness. . . .Nowadays, though, it is different."

"In fact," she explained further, " 'virgin' has become a term of abuse: I have even heard boys shout it at girls in the street, like a swearword. Seeing this horrendous development work its havoc on my own daughter's class at school (she was 14 at the time), I wanted to write something heartening for all those girls (and boys?) left thinking they are somehow inadequate, unnatural, babyish, stupid, cowardly, frigid. . .if they are not ready to join the game." The author knew that using a frozen landscape for a character's life to metaphorically thaw was not a new idea, but by giving her a companion (albeit an imaginary one) she allows Sym to lean on someone; to rely on someone other than herself as she tackles not only the harsh reality that surrounds her, but also her intense inner turmoil. Sym has never fit in, anywhere, until she "met" Titus. That fits perfectly with McCaughrean's target audience of teenagers struggling with outsider status and allows her to develop Sym in tandem with the thickening plot driven by Uncle Victor's maniacal vision.

The deeper she travels into the continent's interior as part of her uncle's twisted dream, the more Sym finds herself disappearing into the real life of Titus Oates in her mind. It's an old trick; something she has done before when overwhelmed with problems in her life. "Sometimes when I need to get further away than usual," she thinks, "I'm Florence Chambers." Chambers was a young woman Oates met only briefly but apparently carried a flame for until his death. As a different Florence, one who eloped with Oates, Sym imagines changing history, she considers sharing a real life with Oates as the kind of woman he would have loved:

"And I ride on the back of Titus's motorbike, and look after his pet deer and exercise his horse in the cool, misty mornings, and afterward we curry the sweat from its flanks, the horse in parentheses between us, our arms mirroring each other as we brush, the tail, splashing us each in turn, amid a smell of saddle soap and straw, because if Titus were ever to love a woman, it wouldn't be anyone helpless or feeble who cried for want of an airplane or out of fright and couldn't make her legs stop shaking or keep her wits about her or marshal her facts; it wouldn't be anyone like that; it wouldn't be anyone like that; no one like that."

The myth of Oates's strength on that last horrific march back from the Pole is what Sym needs to provide comfort on her own dangerous journeys, her own difficult adolescent moments. She remembers also the Brontë sisters who ". . .invented a whole town of people, didn't they — Glasstown — and wrote stories about it in microscopically small handwriting." In times of crisis, Glasstown becomes the metaphor for her interior life, as his Florence, with Oates.

"Anything rather than remember Dad lighting bonfires from books to keep imaginary jackals away from our windows. Glasstown. "Anything rather than drive over a frozen sea, with people who are not what they seem, toward a gaping hole in the Earth.

"Just you and me, Florence," said Titus.

It is through dozens of internal decisions and conversations like these that Sym identifies more and more with her ideal of Oates and separates herself first from family trauma and later from the insanity she finds in Antarctica. McCaughrean knew that Oates was the perfect choice for Sym's fixation as he holds a similar fascination for so many others. ". . .there is something about this taciturn, stoical, insouciant, wry 32–year–old 'outsider' to Scott's group, the manner of his death and the fact that his body was never found, which renders him Romantic in the true sense of the word — like Antoine de St Exupery flying his plane off the radar and into immortality. I needed Sym's companion to be impossibly Ideal," she explains, "someone every female reader could easily fall in love with, every male reader admire; handsome brave, funny, quirky, modest, tragic. . .The more I read up on Oates, the better he lent himself to my purpose. . .the Indian sunshine, the debonair bravery, the pet deer, the useless spelling, the crazy exploits. . . ." This romantic vision is the Oates that Sym needs; the purest and finest Oates that the historical record preserves. But even Sym's ideal will not give her all the answers.

"Did you take morphine, Titus? Before you went outside. I always wondered. Did you?

But Titus declined to say — declined, I think, to be in the same room with people as worthless as us, let alone confide the intimate circumstances of his death."

He is strong until the end, even when he is not really there, even when he is only as one writer, and one girl, could imagine him.

McCaughrean knows though that this Oates is her twist on the myth and through her research for the book came to a very different conclusion about the man himself. ". . .the genuine article would not have been at all easy to get along with. A serious sociopath. He was either fooling about like an overgrown schoolboy or sulking or simply keeping shtum. I doubt he would ever have exchanged a civil word with Sym Wates in real life."

But it wasn't the real Oates that Sym needed anyway, her ideal was enough; her ideal was everything.

Sym's conversations with her interior Oates do follow the true representation of who Oates (and in fact most of his fellow explorers) was. In his recent masterful biography, Scott of the Antarctic: A life of Courage and Tragedy, David Crane deconstructs the specific myths and legends that have arisen in the near century since the doomed journey. His focus is primarily on Scott and the many events in his life and earlier polar expedition that contributed to his catastrophic decisions on the race against Amundsen. But Crane is clear that the acceptance of Scott's choices by his crew — the adherence to his will and continuing admiration of his character — are just as key as the decisions themselves to understanding the tragedy. In the great sprawling epic that was Scott's life, his disappointing father, dependent mother and siblings, strict navy career and deep streak of independent thinking that the first polar journey instilled, Crane finds multiple reasons to explain why the last expedition included one more man then Scott had planned and provisioned for, why his provisions were inadequate in any event, and why the supply depots were inappropriately placed and stocked. None of this was done due to Scott's inexperience or command failures; he just had an almost unreasonable faith in his ability to accomplish his goal. In his public appeal for funds for the expedition he wrote, that the main objective was ". . .to reach the South Pole, and to secure for The British Empire the honour of this achievement." Scott was going to get to the Pole first for King and country regardless of any single thing that might seem to make it impossible and Oates and the rest of the group were determined to do everything they could to help him achieve that goal.

None of them believed it wouldn't succeed because failure was unacceptable and even as they were dying they praised Scott; they praised everything he did and worried most of all that they hadn't succeeded for him.

They were dedicated Englishmen of their age until the end but in modern times, after the hollow earth idea proves to be as bizarre as it sounds (big surprise) and Uncle Victor really goes around the bend (totally), Sym is left utterly alone in a place where she seems destined to die. At that darkest moment, she finds herself questioning just who Oates actually was, beyond the myths that surround him, and whether or not his decision to die for his friends — and their decision to let him — was the right thing for all of them to do.

People are always expecting things of him. Wanting him to have been perfect. Wanting him to have been braver than they ever could be. I won't impose. I wouldn't have let him go outside in the first place.

Poor Titus. He doesn't understand. It's not dying or bravery or The Ice that makes him wonderful — indispensable. It's not the dagger of ice in his heart but the sliver of India's sunshine. It's being lousy at spelling and crying for joy when his horse won a race, and thinking he could sail a yacht because his grandfather was an admiral, and chasing his own motorbike down a mud–baked road, and keeping a deer in the coal store. . .It's the color of his eyes and the silken rope of his voice. It's being thirty–two and beautiful as a dog moon. . .He shouldn't have gone outside. Young men ought to be left to grow old. Friends ought to stay together. I would have made him stay out of pure selfishness — because I couldn't have brought myself to part with him. I would have let him stay and be afraid like ordinary people are. Like me."

While many scholars might wonder if Oates actually said the famous last words that Scott credited to him (Crane sees no reason to doubt), it is only in McCaughrean's fiction that anyone feels sorry for Oates and what he felt he had to do. This is how she manages to connect a 21st century teenager to a long dead explorer and make that connection believable. McCaughrean taps into what they ultimately both had in common: a longing for home.

"I could sleep here," Sym thinks, falling for the illusion of peacefulness. "Like him. I could do that. Look. Even without meaning to, I've lain down full–length. Falling snow has obscured my ski suit already. I look as if I'm dissolving into the ground. 'I'll just stay here, Titus. Your body's here somewhere. It's a good place to be.'"

But Sym is wrong about that — about what happened to Oates in death.

" 'THE ICE SHELF IS MOVING, YOU FOOL!' shouts Titus. 'The surface is moving! All the time! New stuff welling up in the center, pushing the old ice outward! Only a few miles a year but never stopping — on and on and on! Carrying everything with it: Bill and Birdie and the Owner wrapped in their tent. Taffy Evans under his cairn: all carried along inside a river of ice — all the time sinking lower, like dead fish. Sinking through the ice, the saltwater gnawing the ice from under them!' He is shrieking now — so loudly that it pains my eardrums and makes me screw up my face, splitting my lips, leaking warm blood into my mouth. 'In the end the Shelf ships everything into the sea! To wash about in the sea! Lawrence Oates hasn't been in Antarctica for years, Sym! Twenty years ago his body dropped out of the bottom of the ice shelf and into the sea! OATES IS GONE! His body was food for the leopard seas and crabs!'

And then, finally, Sym is done falling prey to the whims of others — done being victimized by her father, her uncle and all those kids at school who never took a moment to really know her. Oates has finally made it through. "I don't want to be in this frigid bitch of a place!" she cries, "I don't want to be in a dead place that doesn't even want my dead body!" McCaughrean has thus found the perfect way to blend myth and reality. Oates, the man about whom Crane writes that "With the possible exception of Scott himself there is no one in polar history so wholly obscured by legend as 'the Soldier. . .'" has proven to be exactly whom Sym needed all along. He is there beside her, "carrying the pain" and more than anything that is what she has always needed; it is what so many teenage readers in particular desperately need. ". . .he makes Sym feel good about herself because he introduces her to her best qualities," explains McCaughrean. And so she triumphs over all of them, over everything, even, unlike Titus Oates, over Antarctica itself.

In his final analysis, David Crane writes that Scott, Oates and their three other companions were ". . .quite literally, killed by the cold. . ." But interestingly enough, it was not so much their mission or their deaths that made them legends, ". . .it was only through his journals and letters that Scott achieved the posthumous dominance over people's minds that he never did alive. It is easy enough to argue that the Scott of 'myth' bore only a passing resemblance to the living man, but the more central truth is that it was only in his written legacy that the values to which he aspired stood shorn of those accidents of character and temper that always came between him and his ideals."

A similar case could be made for Oates both in the letters and journals he left behind and even more importantly in the way that Scott recorded his actions those last few days. Regardless of his envious ability and tragic mistakes as an explorer, Scott found his literary calling when he created his compelling history for those five lost men in Antarctica and Geraldine McCaughrean recognized the real strength behind the memory Scott gave the British public. She saw who Lawrence Oates was beneath the weight of his final words and she gave him the story of Sym and her struggle for survival as a gift. McCaughrean has set Oates free of Robert Scott with her book; she has made him a singular hero for a new generation of readers. The White Darkness is a young adult thriller about a teenage girl fighting for her life in one of the planet's last alien landscapes but it is also the story of a man long dead. Finally, Titus Oates is able to speak for himself and the story he and Sym tell about what survival is really all about is amazing.