YA Review: The White Darkness

McCaughrean, G. (2005). The White Darkness. New York, NY: HarperCollins Pub.

In Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness we are inside the mind of Sym (Symone), a 14-year-old social outcast at the secondary school she attends in London. Her schoolmates consider her to be “a misfit weirdo” (p. 42) with oddities such as her hearing aides in both ears, that she has never had sex and that she has an unusual and highly opinionated uncle Victor. This uncle, speaking to Sym's geography instructor, says, "You learn your subject, then regurgitate it year after year! Around and around, staler and staler. Like astronauts drinking their own piss" (p. 10). Even worse than all that, Sym lets it slip that she has an imaginary friend. Her imaginary friend is Captain Lawrence Oates, nicknamed Titus, an explorer who died 90 years ago and who was a member of Scott’s doomed trek to the South Pole. The story begins after the death of Sym’s father, when her eccentric uncle whisks her away, first to a weekend in Paris, then to the place the two of them have been dreaming about their whole lives - to the Antarctic.

I thought this book was very strange. The world Sym inhabits is so dreadful, every person in it so appalling and horrid, I don’t blame her for having Titus as an imaginary friend. I found Sym to be a sharp observer and her descriptions of people can be funny and cutting like here when she first gets a glimpse of the other people on their Antarctic tour: “ They were, for the most part, bronzed and polished; their watches showed Pacific time and the phases of the moon. Most seemed to own handheld computers, cameras with lenses as long as my forearm, and tiny mobile phones. (The richer you are, I’ve worked out, the smaller your telephone and the bigger your telephoto lens)….They were rich in years, too: The majority were over sixty” (p. 51). In my opinion, the author gives Sym a gift when she plunks her down in Antarctica. Suddenly Sym doesn’t stick out at all – everyone is clumsy in the Antarctic apparently, “Even when we climbed down from the plane onto the blue ice, and tottered and slithered and clung to each other, helpless, out of our element, I could only laugh: Usually it’s just me falling over my own feet” (p. 76).

It isn’t like Sym is perfect. She isn’t. Sym is sympathetic. And I love Titus as much as she does. Odd as it may sound, he is a true friend. Everything Sym believes to be true – even all the awful things she thinks about herself – are called into question as, little by little, in a very peculiar and unsettling way, the truth about uncle Victor is revealed. “The whole idea creeps up on you like pack ice-pressing in and pressing against your head, then crushing the hull and tumbling inside” (p. 4). That passage perfectly describes the strange sinister creepiness I started feeling when uncle Victor first took her away for the weekend in Paris. I was worried for her – afraid that Nabokov’s Lolita was about to happen. It turns out much worse and much more epic at the same time. And Sym rises to the occasion. All of her detailed knowledge of the Antarctic and of the many expeditions to the South Pole ends up coming in quite handy. I was so afraid for her, but it turned out I didn’t have to be. She isn’t as useless as she thought she was. In fact, she’s amazing. And she’s only 14.