The title references, in part, the HMS Terror, one of two ships that ends up frozen for season after season in high-latitude Arctic ice that refuses to melt even during the summer. And much of the book focuses on the mingled dread and dreariness of day after day, week after week, month after month marooned on a ship that is locked in place, under dark skies that never lighten, assaulted by harsh sub-zero winds and savage blizzards. It is brutal and despairing and terrifying (which is of course a secondary signifier of the novel’s title). If I had read the book on the beach in July, I would have had to imagine being cold and miserable; as it happened, I only had to imagine being colder and more miserable. My point is that I want to commend the book for being so unflinchingly immersive, but I can’t be entirely sure that my experience is entirely attributable to Mr. Simmons’s talent, when he was getting a hearty (albeit coincidental) environmental assist.
I like Dan Simmons, by which I mean I like what I’ve read by him so far. I devoured the Hyperion Cantos, a sci-fi quadrilogy which hit all the notes I love in speculative fiction: wildly out-there ideas, mysteries with satisfying resolutions, good characters, a sense of fun, emotional resonance. The Terror was quite good, too, but didn’t sing to me the way the Cantos did, no pun intended. (OK, fine, pun accidental but not regretted in the slightest.) Mainly this was due to the third meaning of the title.
Simmons probably could have written a historically-inspired novel with zero fantastical elements and still come away with a winner of a book, but for some reason, he chose to incorporate a bit of supernatural horror into the Terror. All the while that the British sailors are trapped in the frozen sea, and even as they make their attempts to escape by walking on ice and barren ground, they are stalked by a fearsome predator with a limitless capacity for bloodshed and destruction. It’s just one more element of madness to be contended with as the expedition disintegrates, along with frostbite and scurvy and inadvertent poisoning by spoiled canned foods and mutiny and personal vendettas and on and on. Early on there is speculation that the monster is simply a giant polar bear, but ultimately the omniscient narrator confirms that it is a mythological god-beast with a strange, symbiotic relationship with the Eskimo people who are able to thrive in the very environment that easily destroys hundreds of able-bodied specimens of the Royal Navy. It’s a curious story-telling choice, partly because of the aforementioned likeliness that the novel could have existed without it, and partly because the final version of the novel with the god-beast doesn’t gain all that much from it. I find it curious for another reason, though, connected to my previous exposure to Simmons.
In the Hyperion Cantos, there is an entity known as the Shrike which wreaks havoc throughout the story. The Shrike is composed entirely of metal thorns and razors and has a super-science origin which could not be more different from the spiritual magic of the monster in the Terror. But superficial details aside, they are almost twins. Both favor the slice-and-dice approach to slaughter, with the Shrike using almost surgically precise blades and the monster relying on rending claws. Both have the ability to appear virtually out of nowhere at will, and then disappear again after claiming victims. Both are unpredictable, sometimes appearing and killing everyone in sight, sometimes eviscerating one while sparing another. Both are immune to whatever is the conventional weaponry of the time, whether the energy rifles of Hyperion’s future or the crude shotguns and pistols of the Victorian era. Both are essentially unstoppable. Both (unless I’m wildly misreading Simmons here) symbolize death – unpredictable, implacable Death incarnate.
I hesitate (ever so momentarily) to do too much armchair psychoanalysis here, but I really wonder what trauma is in Simmons’s past that made him represent death’s embodiment so similarly in such wildly different settings. I mean, I get the part where it’s sudden and random and there’s nothing you can do to fight it off, that’s pretty universal. But the metaphor of the blades and the buckets of bloodletting is lost on me, if there is indeed a metaphor at all. Not to be too flippant about a hypothetical personal tragedy, but it’s as if Simmons’s father was killed at a young age in a freak lawnmower factory explosion. Anyone can write a sci-fi epic and give the force-of-nature killing machine antagonist whatever gimmicks they want, and that’s cool with me. But when you follow it up with a quasi-historical novel and just put furry skin on your force-of-nature killing machine antagonist and retain all the amputations and decapitations and gore in its wake … it just makes me wonder.
And, again, it seems a bit like overkill. It’s easy to read all of The Terror as an allegory. Towards the end some of the sailors want to keep moving, despite starvation and exhaustion, to find the mouth of a river that might hold the slim chance of escape and rescue and survival. Other sailors want to return to their ice-locked ship, so damaged by multiple winters that it will never sail again. Each group regards the other and thinks “You’ll die” and each group is right. In a grim, bleak way, the pitiless Arctic is life, and whether you struggle with all your might or just give up, either way Death wins. Fair enough. Also, Death might win not by outlasting your struggle or by accepting your surrender, but by violently scattering your internal organs at clawpoint. Fair enough, I guess …? I suppose whenever someone talks about how you can eat pizza and drink beer and smoke and die of a heart attack or emphysema or cirrhosis, or you can eat tofu and drink water and work out and die anyway, someone else always has to point out you could also get hit by a bus. The bus in Simmons’s world just happens to have insanely sharp edges.
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