Cynthia Reeves’s short but poignant novel The Last Whaler explores the troubled marriage of a young couple isolated in a cabin throughout the Arctic winter. The narrative begins in mid-June 1947 in Kvitfiskneset, Norway, but the story focuses on the factors leading up to a tragic decision that the husband, Tor Handeland, is still struggling to understand ten years later.
For more information about what caused Tor and his wife, Astrid, to become stranded on a remote shore, see Cynthia Reeves’s answers to my questions in this latest author interview.
How did you come to write The Last Whaler?
Hiding under blankets in my childhood bed with flashlight in hand, I devoured stories of polar explorers. Shackelton, Peary, Scott, Nansen, Amundsen, Franklin—I knew their voyages and sometimes tragic outcomes by heart. Deep down, I harbored a longing to witness the sites that they’d often sacrificed their lives to discover. It was a strange wish, given my hatred of the cold and tendency toward seasickness.
Quite by chance, I came across an artist residency aboard a ship that travels the coast of Svalbard—an archipelago midway between Norway’s northern coast and the North Pole—sponsored by ArcticCircle.org. What prompted me to apply for this residency was this: Not long before, shortly after reading Hampton Sides’s In the Kingdom of Ice, I woke from a dream to write a post-apocalyptic story called “The Last Eden” about a botanist stranded in an ice cave with a hominin creature. Right then, I began to envision a series of stories set in the Arctic. Accepted to the 2017 Summer Solstice Expedition, I fulfilled my lifelong ambition to travel to the Arctic and the more immediate desire to gather ideas for my work.
For The Last Whaler, inspiration struck at a remote beach filled with piles of beluga whale bones stretching far along the shore. Our guides knew only that the site had been a whaling station in the 1930s. In my subsequent travel and research, I could find nothing but a short passage about the whaling station in a Svalbard guide. That void sparked The Last Whaler.
Introduce us, please, to the character we meet first, Tor Handeland. Who is he, and where is he in his life at the opening of the novel?
Tor is a middle-aged Norwegian dairy farmer, former beluga whaler, and father of two children when we meet him in 1947. World War II has ended, and he’s not only coping with the war’s aftermath but also coming to terms with his past failures and deep regrets.
And what brings him to Kvitfiskneset on June 18, 1947?
Tor returns to his former whaling station at Kvitfiskneset to recreate a journey he made with his wife, Astrid, a decade before. To celebrate Midsummer’s Eve, 1937, the couple left the station and its crew behind for an evening’s respite from the grueling work of whaling. They trekked to Haven, their private escape downshore. What happened there that night became, as Tor says, “a tipping point … that foretold the time to come.” Reconstructing the journey is, for him, an opportunity to examine his motivations and actions during that crucial summer and come to terms with the events that unfolded as a result.
Much of the story, though, takes place ten years earlier, before the beginning of World War II. How do Tor and his wife, Astrid, end up in an isolated cabin at Kvitfiskneset in 1937?
Still deeply mourning the tragic death of their young son Birk, Astrid and Tor decide to travel together to Kvitfiskneset for the summer whaling season. Both hope that the sojourn will help repair their relationship, which has been strained by grief.
For Tor, the summer also represents a return to his usual season of catching belugas. For Astrid, a university-trained botanist and mentee of the famous Norwegian botanist Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen, the voyage presents a reprieve from her obligations running the family’s dairy farm in southern Norway and an opportunity to return to her first love—studying Arctic flora. Her fondest wish is to discover something new that she can name after her dead son.
We know from early in the book that Tor and Astrid have lost their son Birk. What can you tell us about that?
We see the details of Birk’s death screened through Astrid’s eyes in the first of a series of letters she writes to her dead son. All I want to say here is that Birk’s death is the crucial event that triggers everything that happens afterwards.
They also have a daughter, Birgitta, who is not with them at Kvitfiskneset. Where is she?
Since Tor and Astrid hope that the summer will be a respite from their grief away from the family’s farm as well as a way to repair their marriage, they decide to leave the young Birgitta behind with her maternal grandparents. At that time, it wasn’t unusual for children to be left in the care of family—or nannies—while their parents traveled for extended periods. But as Astrid’s mother, Marit, points out, such leave taking was considered a province of the wealthy, not “laborers” like themselves. The act and repercussions of abandoning Birgitta create one of the novel’s important subtexts.
You intersperse Tor’s search for answers with Astrid’s letters to Birk, written after his death. Why tell the story this way?
The search for the novel’s proper structure took almost as long as writing the novel!
First, I toyed with an omniscient narrator whose tone was decidedly judgmental—too judgmental, in fact, to capture Tor’s genuine regret for his past failures. Next, I wrote eighty pages in a retrospective narration solely from Tor’s point-of-view. Though I loved his voice, I felt that Astrid’s perspective had to be included directly in some way.
Given Astrid’s deep guilt and grief over Birk’s death, I wondered what it would sound like to have her write to her dead son. I composed one letter, and then another, and that was the eureka moment. In one sense, writing letters is a way for Astrid to keep Birk alive. And that idea plays an important role throughout the novel.
Are you writing another novel, and if so, what can you tell us about it?
In August, I’m embarking on a second voyage around Svalbard, this time aboard the icebreaker MV Ortelius. It’s a much larger ship that might be able to carry us to places that the smaller ship Antigua couldn’t. I have an idea that involves a woman’s obsession with a dead fiancé who perished on a remote island on Svalbard—an island that may be accessible with the icebreaker. I’m being deliberately vague, both because I may be inspired by something I can’t anticipate but also because, like many writers, saying too much so early in the process may spoil the adventure for me.
Thank you for answering my questions!
Cynthia Reeves is the author of Falling through the New World and Badlands. The Last Whaler is her latest novel. Find out more about her at https://www.cynthiareeveswriter.com.
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