Author: Dan Simmons
Page Count: 769 pages - Hardcover
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication Date: January 2007
Review originally written 7-18-2007
At the very end of The Terror, after everyone has died and the Captain had undergone his metaphysical rebirth, the ship is encountered for the final time. In the decks of the abandoned ship lies a mysterious corpse, described as having "impossibly long" rodent teeth. Soon after, the Captain leaves the body and burns the ship down, providing no explanation or reason for this final mystery. This puzzling scene is just one of many which leaves me scratching my head. The Terror is a carefully crafted novel that unfortunately collapses during the final chapters, and ultimately concludes on a sour note.
I want to like this book. I really do. Dan Simmons is an excellent writer, and I enjoyed several previous novels written by him, such as the Hyperion series. In The Terror, Simmons conducted extensive research into the 1845 Franklin Expedition, and this research shows through. It stands out in the small details, from the descriptions of the spoiled canned food, to the shocking amount of luxury items stocked aboard the ship Erebus, to the scribbled cairn message Captain Crozier leaves on King William Island towards the end of the book. Three pages of acknowledgements show the amount of labor that went into studying this period. If Simmons had left it as a historical novel with slight supernatural overtones, it would have excelled. But this was not to be.
At the very end of the novel things change. While the first 680 pages are concerned with the harrowing tale of the crewman as they try to survive in the arctic winter while simultaneously being attacked by a mysterious creature, the final 80 pages shift into a discourse on Eskimo mythology. It took me by suprise, to say the least. Looking back through the earlier sections of the novel, some foreshadowing is seen, but not nearly as much as there should be. Instead of thinking "this is a good, if unexpected, ending," the reader is left asking, "what the Hell just happened?" This ending purports to wrap everything up in a nice little package, but all it actually does is confuse the reader.
One example is with the fate of the crewman. Near the end of the novel, the crew splits into several groups, with some trying to find their way back to the abandoned ship, while others head South to try and find open water. After they all go their separate ways, the narrative becomes focused solely on Captain Crozier and the book ends with him. Simmons never mentions any of these crewman ever again, and the reader is left wondering about their fates. The reasonable expectation is that everyone else died, but would it have been so difficult to simply say that? After following these characters every minute step of the way through the rest of the book, this lack of a conclusion seems to leave the novel unfinished.
I understand that Simmons couldn't have the crewman finding their way home and living happily ever after. He has to work within the constraints imposed by the historical record, and he does an admirable job of that. The historical Terror and its sister ship Erebus were lost in the arctic, and no crewman was ever found by the several rescue expeditions sent after it. I realize none of these men are coming home. But to essentially end the novel with the crewman blindly groping along on the arctic ice, never to learn when or how they die, is very lackluster. Through the final chapters about Crozier I kept expecting some mention of the lost crews, something as simple as a body or an Eskimo saying they all died, but nothing materialized.
But up until the end, the novel was almost entirely enjoyable. I was amused by the "Masque of the Red Death" carnival (even though it did feel too much like an homage to Edgar Allan Poe rather than a legitimate plot device), and in some chapters the Terror Beast really was terrifying. That too failed in the end, when the Beast was revealed to be some great Eskimo Spirit. In my opinion, the true nature of the Beast should never have been revealed. It should have always been a mystery to the crewmen and the reader. Had that happened, the entire ending could have been avoided, and story would be better for it.
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