Colony

This is a somewhat delayed review – I read this book a month back, and what I see looking back is something different from what I felt at the time.

Obviously, it’s a ripping good yarn – strong characters with plausible backstories, some nice twists, plenty of suspense, a slow beginning to seduce the nervous, then some race and pace and gore for the more adventurous – altogether an intelligent read without being too demanding. I read it over a couple of rainy days and it did what I wanted – passed the time, took me out of myself, left me going back for more. Benjamin Cross is a talented writer and does this genre well.

But looking back, what I remember more than the story is the location – the ice, the fog, the emptiness, the coldness of the water, the whales, the endless arctic bleakness. I found myself thinking about going there. I could take the book with me and read it all again! Of course! This book would make a great holiday read - like those lovely Canary Island mysteries by Isobel Blackthorn that get snapped up by holidaymakers on their way to Fuerteventura or Lanzarotte…. Something to while away the time on days when fog makes the view a little claustrophobic, but you still want to feel you are taking in the experience...

Then I got a grip. Even with Covid closing down all the normal destinations (and I dare say the Russian Arctic isn’t overly troubled with the virus so it may still be safe to go there) tourism to the frozen poles may not hit the mass market. This book is a best seller and that hasn’t depended on Arctic cruises….

Yet still, remembering this read, I kept thinking of the landscapes, and it dawned on me that what Cross has brought to this landscape, that gives it so much more depth, is a sense of time passing… The terrifying moment by moment time of individuals trying to survive this landscape – icy water that would kill you in minutes, never mind the more fanciful threats that he introduces – but also the vast stretches of time since a neolithic hunter came to grief in the ice, and back further, to when the dinosaurs roamed the whole planet, and further, further, further to the shaping of the Antarctic continent, the infinite days of ice forming… and then, snapping back into human time, the tiny number of decades before our activity may destroy what millenia have created.

Yes. Cross is an archaeologist. He deals in time. If he’d been an economist or a civil engineer or a politician, he’d still have all those great talents at writing, and he’d still write ripping yarns that pass the time and pull in the readers. But maybe those books wouldn’t linger so in the mind. Thank you for the depth of time, Mr Cross, as well as the ripping yarn and the shattering landscapes.