ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Just last week I was toying with the idea of joining Marina Sofia in her December reading project ‘Russians in the Snow’ because I thought that settings in snowy wastes would be consoling in the extreme heat of an Australian summer.  Little did I know that within a day or two I would be reading a book that sent a chill down my spine, and not just because it’s set in the polar region of Norway!

This is the blurb about Robyn Mundy’s new novel Cold Coast:

Inspired by the story of Svalbard’s first female trapper, Cold Coast is a gripping portrayal of survival within the stark beauty and perilous wilderness of the high Arctic.

In 1932, Wanny Woldstad, a young widow, travels to Svalbard, daring to enter the Norwegian trappers’ fiercely guarded male domain. She must prove to Anders Sæterdal, her trapping partner who makes no secret of his disdain, that a woman is fit for the task. Over the course of a Svalbard winter, Wanny and Sæterdal will confront polar bears, traverse glaciers, withstand blizzards and the dangers of sea ice, and hike miles to trap Arctic fox, all in the frigid darkness of the four-month polar night. For Wanny, the darkness hides her own deceptions that, if exposed, speak to the untenable sacrifice of a 1930s woman longing to fulfil a dream.

Alongside the raw, confronting nature of the trappers’ work, is the story of a young blue Arctic fox, itself a hunter, who must eke out a living and navigate the trappers’ world if it is to survive its first Arctic winter.

Mundy is brilliant at capturing the sensory immediacy of her characters’ environment.  She knows it well from her own experience in wild places.  Her first novel The Nature of Ice was set in Antarctica where she has wintered and summered; and she has worked seasonally in Svalbard, Greenland, Antarctica, the Norwegian Coast and wild Scotland as a ship-based tour guide.  This is the moment when it is too late for Wanny to change her mind:

The clanging of the anchor chain reverberates across the water to the shoreline where she stands beside Sæterdal.  Sjefen, Chief, the men call him. They watch as the boat swings out, three warbling blasts to signal farewell.  A year before they will see another ship.  A year away from those she holds most dear.  She draws herself firm, raises her arm, imagining how, from out there, she and he are two stick figures, barely human, marooned in frozen vastness.

When the ship motors from view, too late to change her mind, a man’s voice comes to her as sharply as the wind that shimmies down the mountain and knocks a fist between her shoulder blades. (p.29)

Summer is making a belated start here in Victoria, so it was comforting to read this novel under the warmth of the doona, but Cold Coast is not a book to read at bedtime because the narrative tension is constant.  It is not just foxes that break into the hut in search of food, bears do it too, and neither Sæterdal nor Wanny can relax their scrutiny of the landscape for long.  Every venture means risk, and there are heart-stopping moments when survival is touch and go, not least because they can rarely trust the ice beneath their feet.

Their New year trip to Fuglefjell has been delayed thanks to a second inscrutable week of heavy snow, then showers of rain, then freeze and hail, the only constant a fierceness of wind which jams new rafts of ice and logs of driftwood up along the shoreline.  Out in the fjord, bergs locked in the sea split and topple, issuing a booming thunder and opening up the ice until the gash refreezes.  When snowdrift eases enough to see out the back door, to make headway on skis beyond the Signal, they slip and slither on patches of black ice.  Their dogs slide on their haunches in a knot of harnesses, the sledge toppling when it hits the snow.  Wanny loses count of the trigger locks she pulls apart, the wooden pieces doused with rain then frozen in place, all along the trap line.  She struggles physically and mentally at the thought of twenty traps — the kilograms of stone to be offloaded, each trap cleared of snow before it can be rebaited, the aching effort of gingerly reloading thirty, forty kilograms of stone back onto a frame… (p.147)

Mundy does not shirk the confronting issue of hunting and trapping in this fragile environment.  Indeed, this novel is a powerful argument for why such places should be protected.  Wanny and Sæterdal are not evil, greedy people, but they are there to make money.  Some of what they kill is for food, but they prey on animals with a valuable pelt, because of human desires. When Wanny asks why a bearskin is worth less than a fox, Sæterdal taunts her:

The Chief scoffs. ‘Next time you are hobnobbing in your taxi, ask your own fair sex why they squander their husband’s savings to wear a fox’s coat.’

He dismisses women so harshly.  ‘Perhaps because it is practical,’ she retaliates.  ‘Because fox is warm and light as air to wear.  Because it is soft and utterly beautiful.’

‘Beautiful it may be.  Nought to do with practicality.  There are plenty of other options to keep a person warm.  ‘With ladies’, he says, ‘it is all about fashion and vanity.  The gentle art of persuasion that wives excel at with their husbands’ wallets,’ he says.  ‘You can be sure it is not you or me to reap the reward.  Fur traders are the ones growing fat on the profits.’ (p.147)

That, for Sæterdal, is a long speech! It takes great authorial skill to sustain a narrative about just two such reticent characters.  Wanny’s interior thoughts are predominant, but there are frequent glimpses of Sæterdal’s insecurities as well.  As the year progresses they share edited versions of their backstories, but neither is willing to go much beyond a precis.  Much of their time is spent in silence, but this wild place is not silent — there is the barking of their three dogs, the bird calls,  the rattle of the stovepipe in the hut, the hail on the roof drowning out any attempts at speech, the thunder of an iceberg calving, the howling of the wind or the deadening effects of a lethal fog.

Parallel to the story written from the human perspective is the story of the Blue Fox, runt of the litter and cheeky in its scorn for their plans to trap it.  It is a reminder that the polar regions belong to the wildlife there and that the humans are interlopers whose survival depends not on the resources of the natural world but rather what they bring with them.  However Sæterdal and Wanny do share some aspects of the fox’s survival arsenal.  What they bring with them, is not just the paraphernalia of guns, knives, tools, food and warm clothing, it is also courage, determination, skill, and a capacity to adapt and learn.

Cold Coast is going to be one of my Best Books of the Year.

PS Many thanks to Amanda Curtin for bringing this book to my attention.

Author: Robyn Mundy
Title: Cold Coast
Cover design by Sandy Cull
Publisher: Ultimo Press (Hardie Grant), 2021
ISBN: 9781761150210, pbk., 277 pages
Source: Bayside Library