The Most Glorified Strip of Bunting

The United States North Polar expedition of 1871-73 was a disaster-strewn adventure that counts amongst the most bizarre and exciting in the annals of Arctic exploration. Commanded by Charles Francis Hall, a romantic idealist with an obsessive interest in the frozen north, the converted river tug Polaris carries a multinational crew of scientists and sailors, assisted by two Inuit families, along the so-called American Way to the North Pole - the icy channels between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. For Hall, the planting of the Stars and Stripes on the top of the world is a sacred and patriotic duty, but his enthusiasm is shared by few of his companions, and the expedition, under the strain of conditions in the high Arctic, quickly disintegrates into warring factions. With their ship embedded in the ice, the explorers plunge into a maelstrom of anarchy and paranoia fuelled by the clash of two civilisations – Inuit and European – and the mutual misunderstanding and hostility that arise from it.

John McGill’s novel chronicles the events leading up to the strange and suspicious death of the commander, and in a parallel narrative, tells the astonishing tale of the nineteen crew members separated in a storm and cast adrift on an ice floe. Their story is one of the truly great Arctic adventures, a six-month drama of narrow escapes coloured by the ever-present threats of rape, murder and cannibalism, and acted out on a shrinking platform of ice exposed to all the horrors of the most inhospitable climate on earth.

Praise for The Most Glorified Strip of Bunting:

‘A murder mystery and a moral fable, the book is superbly structured in a ping pong of chapters that exploit chronology and revel in the present tense. A page turner with the obligatory saucy bits. McGill’s book may also be read as a critiique of US foreign policy, then and now - but will be more properly admired as a darn good yarn.’
The Herald

About John McGill

John McGill was born in Glasgow and now lives in Orkney. He has taught English all over the place and has published a collection of short stories, That Rubens Guy, and a novel, Giraffes. His stories have featured in a number of anthologies and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and Radio Scotland.

An Interview with John McGill

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t fiddling around with stories, so the idea of inspiration hardly seems relevant, any more than it would be for walking, or breathing, or eating. The urge to publish in book form came fairly late, when I was past forty, and here I can perhaps point to a couple of literary inspirations: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Gabriel Marcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. In some odd way I thought the lives of smalltown middle-Americans and Colombian peasants seemed connected to the lives of the Glasgow slum-dwellers among whom I grew up. My collection of stories, That Rubens Guy, was an attempt to combine Anderson’s downbeat realism with Marquez’s magic. I was pleased when one or two critics made the South American parallel, but also when another one mentioned Katherine Mansfield!

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind The Most Glorified Strip of Bunting? And about what you were trying to achieve, what ideas you were trying to convey?

Those of us who live in high latitudes tend to acquire an interest in things Arctic, and many of us move from that to things polar and to exploration in general. The quests for the grails of nineteenth-century exploration; the Poles, the source of the Nile, the Northwest Passage, etc., provide wonderful scope for the storyteller. Robert Edwin Peary thought that the sacrifice of eight toes was a small price to pay for the attainment of the North Pole, and his fanatical dedication to his task is typical of the breed. Whether driven by greed, glory, or sheer romantic lust for adventure, they pitted themselves against the most savage environments on the planet and endured unspeakable hardships, often in pursuit of pointless or even imaginary goals. In the case of the polar explorers, the extremes of isolation, hunger, cold and darkness created fascinating emotional cauldrons – Big Brother on ice! The United States North Polar Expedition, the story of which is told in The Most Glorified Strip of Bunting, offers particularly rich possibilities because, almost uniquely, it gives prominent roles to women. It is a thrilling adventure story, but the sexual element makes it a lot more than just that. In particular, it presents a series of fascinating dichotomies: romantics v cynics, explorers v scientists, Europeans v Inuit, patriots v mercenaries, men v women. The shifting patterns of these conflicts make for a complex, but I hope absorbing, narrative. The drama is also enhanced by having a murder mystery, the death of its commander, at its heart.

How do you go about creating your voice on the page?

I think the creation of a narrative voice is often an unconscious process: even in third person narrative, you find yourself making subtle alterations in tone depending on which character or set of characters you are dealing with. Olympian omniscience is rarely an option, might even be impossible, and irony seems to sneak in uninvited! I enjoy the business of creating first person narrators, usually people very different from myself and often based, with suitable disguise, on acquaintances..

How and when do you write?

(a) I have a one-room shack on a beautiful bay on the island of Hoy. In the early morning I walk the dog along the beach, writing in my head. Then I go back to the shack and scribble things down fast in an old jotter. That done, I feel confident about being able to polish and finish on the word processor. (b) Over a long career as a teacher and trade-unionist, I’ve developed an enviable ability to do the scribbling at the back of meeting rooms and conference halls while devoting some small part of my brain to the proceedings. Then I sit down at the keyboard and marvel at how brilliant the scribblings are!

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?

Just about everything – I enjoy bad books nearly as much as good ones. I confess reluctantly to feeling most at home in the 18th century, with Swift, Fielding, Smollett and, above all, Sterne. I dip into Tristram Shandy frequently and read it cover-to-cover every second year or so, and I have a similar affection for Alice in Wonderland. A list of other favourites reveals a predilection for the oddball: Hogg’s Confessions, Thoreau’s Walden, Butler’s Erewhon and The Way of all Flesh, Jeffries’ After London, Gray’s Lanark. In similar vein, I love the grotesque tradition in German fiction, from Hoffman through Kleist and Kafka to Grass’s Danzig Trilogy. None of which detracts from my admiration for the great chroniclers of the quotidian: Austen, Chekov, Mansfield, Dreiser, et al.

I try to keep up with contemporary fiction, but find myself turning increasingly to biography, history and popular science. I don’t want to die without having at least made an attempt to understand quantum mechanics. I’ve just finished Orhan Pamuk’s Snow and The White Castle and enjoyed them enough to make me pick up My Name Is Red: he combines the personal with the political in a very convincing way. Stud Terkel’s And They All Sang – interviews with musicians - is my current bed-time read. Great stuff. My daughter lent me her copy of Vanity Fair on the Orkney boat the other day and I marvelled afresh at its dazzling opening chapter.

An extract from The Most Glorified Strip of Bunting

Joe sits. Cassiopeia wheels. In the thin moonlight, in the sharp silence, the harpoon is better than the Springfield rifle. Six hours he sits, though he does not count hours or particularly mark Cassiopeia’s quarter-circling of the Star.

He has sat, this Joe, on gilt-surrounded plush, sipped tea with the Empress of India, sucked partridge bones with the Prince Consort.

Now he perches on his ice-stool and time is not circling stars but the chants he composes to the rhythm of his own slow heartbeat. Under him he feels walrus and narwhal and the variegated seal tribes – the Greenland, the ringed, the thunder-headed oogjook – and he selects one, a small shiny spotted Greenlander, and enters him and bloodtalks to him. He sees the heart which he will remove and eat the instant the seal is on its back by the hole, as his payment for the frozen hours. He chews a piece of flipper, spit-softened by Hannah, and his chewing too finds the rhythm of his silent chant as his heartbeat tunes to the seal’s pulsing blood:

Come to the breathing hole, little brother,
Come to the breathing hole, little friend,
My harpoon-head is worried.
Let me see your head here, above the ice,
Little bowl of blood-soup, little blubber-feast, little shitbag,
I’ll chew your heart, Tookolito will lick your liver,
Puney will suck your warm eyes. Yes – the breathing hole, little friend,
Show your nose to the moon, little brother.

There is no wind, no grinding of the ice. But there is movement up high, a dance of moonlit clouds and a noise of starsong that slips under his chant. He sleeps with eyes and ears open, focused on the two-inch hole. Eyes, nose, ears, fingertips – they work unbidden, like his singing blood, and his mind is free for pictures, memories, anticipations.

Hannah’s wise feet, famous for having massaged Captain Hall’s frozen ones and thereby saving his toes. At lectures in five states she bowed to the applause while Hall introduced her and her feet, pronouncing her real name with romantic slow emphasis: Ladies and gentlemen – Tookolito.

These feet are cleverer than the ladies and gentlemen or Hall or Budington or Tyson or the scientists can ever know. Joe makes pictures: in the sweet blubbery warmth under the bearskin her toes coax and tease his oosook (which even now in his half-starved state rises to the memory, salutes their cunning) while his fingers and hers meet between her thighs in the warmest haven in the igloo. Beside them, Puney grunts her irritation and hunger and Captain Tyson knows nothing.

Tyson has told him the temperature is minus fourteen, forty-four degrees of frost, too cold for the hunt. But he has gone because the wind has died and because Puney has sobbed, and because there is a clear sky and moonlight too bright to be wasted. The moonlight is sharper, reveals more than the hour and a half of noon twilight. Within an hour his heart and fingertips are synchronised to the ghostly frolickings under the ice while his head roams free. There is a parade of feasts in his skull – deep red oogjook soup, delicate sweet walrus liver, a comically small chewy oosook from Nanuk the ice-bear, blankets of maktak fresh from the whale, warming the gums and the throat. Then satiation, and Hannah laughing under the skins as she steers his oosook from her ribs to friendlier shores.