Book Review: Dark Matter

Not all of my reviews are from years back.  This one is actually a book I read only a couple months ago.  Sure, it isn't cutting edge, but it's a fresher than most.  Yea fresh!


Dark Matter: A Novel, by Michelle Paver

Source: MichellePaver.com



 From the book's cover:

January 1937. Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely and desperate to change his life. So when he's offered the chance to join an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it. Spirits are high as the ship leaves Norway: five men and eight huskies, crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year. Gruhuken. But the Arctic summer is brief. As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave. He faces a stark choice. Stay or go. Soon he will see the last of the sun, as the polar night engulfs the camp in months of darkness. Soon he will reach the point of no return - when the sea will freeze, making escape impossible. And Gruhuken is not uninhabited. Jack is not alone. Something walks there in the dark...


The review:

For a synopsis of the plot of Dark Matter, I'm going the lazy writer path and using someone else's very well written paragraph.

Set in 1937, a British expedition is planned to the far north, to examine the geology and topology of a now deserted mining community- Gruhuken.  Going against advice of the region’s seafarers who seem superstitious about Gruhuken for reasons they won’t divulge, a party of three men set up camp, but it is not long before bad luck starts to befall them. As the perpetual darkness of an Arctic winter approaches, they realise that something is lurking amidst the stark wilderness- and whatever it is; it wants Gruhuken all for itself… 

The preceding was taken from the author of "My Good Bookshelf," another online book review blog.  I couldn't find his or her name, but here is the link to the whole review article.

The author, Michelle Paver.  She's the one on the right, by the way. / Source: redhammer.info

For my own thoughts on Dark Matter...  I liked it.  Well, I liked it up until the end, but I'll explain that more in a minute.  Paver does a wonderful job of building tension, and painting a scene of foreboding and dread.  As I understand it, she took a trip to the island group of Svalbard, and to the island of Spitsbergen where Gruhuken is fictionally located, way up in the Arctic Ocean.  The time spent must have been both fascinating and eerie, because Paver's writing conjures these qualities about the area.  You can see it very clearly in your imagination, as you read along.

Dark Matter was in fact the first book I had read "in print" in some time, seeing as most books between the present and the start of college for me that I read for myself (i.e.: not textbooks) were audiobooks.  And I couldn't put it down.  Thankfully it was a short book, and so my life was not massively impacted by this inability to release!  It reminded me in some ways of Call of the Wild by London, though mostly in setting and shortness paired to delivery, and not in storyline directly.


Not a bad "book trailer," though the scenes in the book pertaining to the post were the ones that really made my blood curdle.  Too bad it didn't make an appearance in this clip.

On the other hand...  well as I said earlier, I liked the book up until the end.  The build-up the author had going seemed to fall off when the actual climax arrived.  maybe it is a symptom of the book being written in journal-entry form.  You don't really write in your journal while a ghost stands over you, nor in a rowboat on your way to being rescued, or when...  well I'll save those details for the potential reader of the novel.  For me, I was practically hyperventilating with paranoid discomfort, what with the ice closing in and the daylight completely gone (at that latitude, entire weeks go by with no sunlight touching the surface of the Earth, and anyone living in the region must be able to stand living in perpetual night) and the foreboding sense of dread that you get from the lingering spirit of the drowned man’s ghost.

Further, I didn’t like the so-called “romantic” element.  Call me old-fashioned if you like, but the implication that the protagonist has feelings for another man which are not revealed until the big finish, and so turn the book's end a certain degree right as we're getting rightly spooked…  it turned me off.  I’m not trying to say it isn’t realistic, nor that I'm blindly biased against homosexual feelings, but it was… well it was distracting to me.  Here we have a good old spook yarn and the tension is high and you are hanging by every page…  and then there is the disharmonious note of unanticipated attraction (at least for me - maybe I’m naive, but I didn’t really see that coming).  It seemed like it turned what was up until that moment a rip-roaring spook tale into a political statement or something.  Yes, that is probably rooted in some sort of bias on my part.  And I do apologize for it, as I do try to be fair to all, as best I am able.  What I'm trying to say is that for me personally, it was like sweet harmony being thrown off at the climax by flat and out of tunes sequences.  That was my own interpretation.  Yours may vary.

There is a scene described in Dark Matter where the lone protagonist stands, watching the Norwegians (I think that was their nationality) row back to their ship to set sail, and the sun is going down, and the author paints such a picture of both solitude and quiet dread that when something subtly supernatural happens, you feel it like a gut punch.  Paver's novel is well worth the read, despite my feeling of let-down by the end. / Source: mrbsemporium.com

Be that as it may, I'd say that overall, the story was great.  And the setting was…  very effective.  The isolation and attendant spookiness of the building dread were first rate.  For that alone, Dark Matter is recommended.  Very much worth the read, and sublime at drawing the reader into the dark and forbidding northlands, surrounded by ice, sea, discarded whale bones, and the evils men do.

Learn more about Dark Matter: A Novel, by Michelle Paver, on Amazon.com

The parting comment:

Some of this video seemed humorous to me, based on my experience working for a major hardware retailer.  However, I must note (and I do it in all capital letters so you won't miss it) I SUGGEST STOPPING THE VIDEO AT THE 4:00 MINUTE MARK.  The rest afterward gets a bit raunchy, and I was disappointed.  It's a shame that what passes for humor so much these days seems like it must be gross and lewd at least in some degree.  So please, if you keep going past the four minute mark, don't say I didn't warn you.


I've seen co-workers do things similar to what the bearded Home Depot "employee" does, and I've also personally seen couples who I thought were going to go off the deep end like these two "customers." I suppose that is why it was funny to me, up until that four minute point.  As the saying goes: you had to be there, I guess.