This isn't so much a review as a bunch of the stuff I thought about while reading this. Expect that this year, as I have 100+ books to read, and I'm already behind.
First, I loved this book. I was completely entranced by the lead character, a GI named Muldrow who gets shot down over Tokyo during World War II. I've been really into war novels lately, but I hadn't read one of the "trek through enemy territory" variety yet. Muldrow is a weird guy, a fact established from the very beginning, but I found his reactions throughout the story really fascinating, and while I think they probably were unusual, he didn't seem particularly mad to me. I mention that word, "mad" in particular, because all the comments on the book cover are about "outland craziness" and "snow, murder, madness, and war." I'll give you all those descriptors except mad.
Yes, getting shot down in Tokyo and deciding to head North because it's what you know, rather than trying to get yourself rescued is probably strange, but Muldrow's a strange guy. He is, at heart, a survivalist, and he knows that in the North he'll be able to survive (he grew up in isolated northern Alaska). Yeah, he kills some people on the way, but then again he is in enemy territory, surrounded by people who would kill him, so if we say he is mad for killing these people, that seems less of an indictment of this character, and more of an indictment of war in general, which I'm fine with. He also indulges in extended fantasies about Alaska, the land, the snow, the animals and he often pretends to be them in order to take on their attributes such as the stealthiness of the fisher marten or the camouflage capabilities of the hare. Once again, that seems totemic, and not crazy.
Given all that, I liked that while Muldrow engaged in some odd behavior, at each stage his actions seemed like a logical extension of who he was as a person and the extreme circumstances he was in. And I'm glad, because it made the book believable. The ultimate caveat, of course, is that we find out later that he killed some poor girl from Kansas even when he was back in Alaska, and well, there's just no cause for killing good Kansans.
I thought a lot about On the Road while reading this. The tale of the solitary trek on a road through enemy territory with the idea that at the end there's a promised land of safety is a common storyline. I see the palatability of setting it as a post-apocalyptic story instead of a war story - the protagonist in a post-apocalypse story is an unabashedly "good" survivor, battling zombies or some other corrupted form of human. Any taking of "life" that has to happen is okay, and you get to really focus on the inner struggle of said protagonist without any ambiguities as to their value. Placing the story in a war setting makes the story much less black and white. The "enemy" is real people, many of whom may seem more noble than our hero. I like the war story better because it forces you to think, to deal with the fact that real life is gray and complicated.
Finally, I've never read Deliverance, maybe I will for my Southern Lit challenge, but based on this book, James Dickey was an excellent storyteller. For me, a good story has two key elements - a good plot (good meaning a wide variety of things) and appropriate kinds of detail to sell it. In To the White Sea, that detail was about Alaska. In many cases, the descriptions of Alaska and its wildlife were much more vivid than those of Japan, an effect that is meant to echo Muldrow's own experience in which he is, in his mind, in Alaska, his safe place, in order to survive Japan, the hostile place that he's only passing through. To whatever purpose, the prose made Alaska seem beautiful and wild and I think really captured a feeling of not just what the place was like, but what it was like from the inside.
This counts toward my 100+ Challenge.
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