Have you ever played at being an Arctic explorer? Looked at the icy expanse of your backyard as if it was the desolate plain of a frozen tundra? Come to the exciting realization that you and your best friend have run out of food, forcing you to contemplate eating the family dog?
Amy Sackville’s The Still Point reminds me of this game, as I found myself walking the icy streets of my Ontario city, looking past the people, buildings, and crowded streets to the far horizon to the north. Sackville’s novel oscillates between centuries and characters, chronicling the life of a nineteenth century Arctic explorer, Edward Mackley, through the eyes of Julia, Edward’s distant niece, who lives in the family house just outside of London and is wandering through the family archives.
The Still Point follows Julia for a single sticky summer day, as she relives Edward’s Arctic as a kind of romantic and shapeless dreamscape, and attempts to create a meal that will save her marriage with Simon, a straight-edged architect. The daring use of an omniscient and controlling narrative voice succeeds in bringing us into Julia’s narrative to sweat it out with her in her old and cluttered Victorian home, and to slowly freeze with Edward as he desperately seeks that mythical still point. This narrative voice addresses us directly and it is, perhaps, what makes the story so compelling and intimate: “You can draw a little nearer if you’re very quiet. Put your face close to his, close enough to feel the gentle rumble and stink of his breath; feel the damp warmth of hers on your own cheek.”
There is immense pleasure to be gained from the way this book pulls us into the narrative, transforming us into waiting housewives and wandering husbands. This novel pulled me in to circle the still point with Julia and Edward, the characters and the landscapes stayed with me, and I still think of sitting with Julia in her attic among the dust and the stuffed trophy animals to seek the cold and elusive constancy of the north pole. With incredible narrative pace and movement, The Still Point instilled in me a desire for the stasis of the still point, where the world moves under me and where I am beyond the shifting uncertainty of a turning world.
