“Would you like to travel on a government icebreaker? I think if you do the journey, something will come of it.” Something does and to Horatio Clare’s great credit, since this could have been a book-length advertorial, he recognises the invitation by the Finnish embassy, to mark the centenary of the country’s independence from Russia, for the PR exercise it is. Nevertheless. Clare, whose Down to the Sea in Ships (2014) chronicled his experiences sailing with the Danish Maersk container company, leaps at the chance.
His berth is aboard the Otso: 7,000 tonnes, 100 metres long, 40 metres high. Its bridge bristles with technology; its engine room, provisioned with 50,000 spare parts, roars with scarcely contained power. It has two saunas (one for officers, one for the crew), a gym, a “stinking coffin” of a Playboy-plastered smoking room and the atmosphere of a working men’s club. During Clare’s 10-day stint, the ship escorts a variety of carriers across the Bay of Bothnia, just shy of the Arctic Circle, and smashes free those that have become ensnarled. It is work that is one part “euphoric vandalism” and one part intimate, catastrophe-courting maritime ballet, performed to a soundtrack of Bon Jovi and Belinda Carlisle.
Icebreaking aside, Clare diligently earns his passage. He notes Finland’s excellent health and education systems (the latter free up to PhD level), its decision to trial a universal basic income and its outstanding levels of gender equality. In 1906, Finnish women became among the first in the world to achieve universal suffrage and by 2007 more than 41% of the country’s MPs were female. However, it is the Finns’ character that interests him most, not least their sisu, an untranslatable combination of grit, courage and resilience that is embodied by their national hero, Carl Gustaf Mannerheim.
It was sisu that fuelled the Finns, under Mannerheim’s command as they fought off the Soviet invasion of 1939 and sisu that led them to invent Molotov cocktails in the process.
Then there is the national talent for taciturnity. Clare discovers that Finnish silence is a language in itself, but “the greatest Finnish silence of them all” is the one that continues to surround the still-painful subject of the country’s 1918 civil war.
For Clare, however, it is the silence arising from the absent voices of his shipmates’ wives and children that registers mostly keenly. The job of the captain is to “synthesise and broadcast wellbeing”, but Clare confesses that it requires an act of will to stop isolation from spiralling into depression.
Reasons to be cheerful might indeed seem in short supply when you’re shattering ice of ever-diminishing extent while devouring staggering amounts of fuel. It comes as a shock to learn that all the ships that crisscross our blue planet produce enough carbon dioxide to make them the seventh most polluting nation on Earth.
The nightmarish future is an all too vivid reality for Clare, a place full “of outraged nature… where the environment is vengefully dominant, forcing us to live like Finnish seafarers – behind glass, monitoring, waiting”. At times, there is a palpable sense of anger that alternates with clear-eyed dread: the Met Office has, after all, predicted that the Arctic could be seasonally ice-free in under 30 years. Yet one of Clare’s distinctive virtues as a travel writer is that he is never not alive to delight.
Icebreakers never anchor for the indisputably good reason that they would themselves become stuck fast, but Clare has a gift for pinning to the page all that comes his way. His is a joy in framing with such precision and flair that it is the opposite of indulgent, allowing the reader to share in his own marvelling encounters. Otso’s orange lifeboats, for example, adorn its huge sides “like tiny water wings”; a passing raven is “like a ragged priest bent on establishing a mission”; a sea eagle “neck thrust forward between enormous wings, is… intent as an assassin”. Even the smell of ice is parsed: “a premonition of snow… a pellucid starkness, an absence, clean and clear”.
It seems unlikely that the Finnish government could have anticipated the book that their guest has ultimately delivered: nimble, vital, unexpectedly affecting. But it seems equally unlikely that they will have any complaints.
• Icebreaker: A voyage far North by Horatio Clare is published by Chatto & Windus (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
