Robyn Mundy’s novel about Wanny Wolstad’s extraordinary life is just right for the times. Review by Jessie Tu
In the Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, there is a small island called Svalbard, a mountainous region of ice and rock, roughly the size of Tasmania. There lived a woman named Wanny Woldstad. She was 39 years old in 1932 when she decided to travel to the rugged, remote terrain of glaciers and the frozen tundras in the north with a team of expert trappers.
, published several decades after her time in the frozen north, which was an inspiration for her novel,Mundy’s own life in the arctic shows in her immersive prose – she’s worked as a ship-based tour guide in Svalbard, Greenland and Antarctica and the Norwegian coast. She knows the landscape intimately – wind that “scours the glacier clean of its covering, early morning light an undulating sea, milky blue, the mountain is a chorus, fulmars wheeling in the breeze”.
The world inside her body can only be realised once she’s out there among the bears, the foxes, the whiteness of ice and blueness of the sea.When the famous trapper Anders Sæterdal accepts her as his trapping partner for the year, she rises to the challenge. Minus 30-degree temperatures are the least of their concerns. Through 18-hour sunless days, she works the double-barrelled shotgun, slugs, harpoon, rod and line, a stack of hessian sacks, a flensing knife.
Mundy’s evocative language puts you right in the line of fire – “Is there any bolder stake to man than a refuge built in such a place? Rock. Mountain. Terraces of snow. These endless pointed peaks.” inspires – it’s something shaped by the frozen fjords, the rare blue fox appearance, the polar bears. Navigating the mechanics of this kind of life is a joy, inexplicable to anyone who has not had the chance to experience the vision of this overwhelming beauty..
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