Beryl Bainbridge's (1933- ) The Birthday Boys (1993) offers a poignant, fictional account of the Scott expedition. The story is alternately narrated by five members of the crew, including Scott himself. Each one carries the story forward chronologically from the ship's leaving port to the death of crew member Edward Oates (dying of gangrene, he crawls out of his tent to expose himself to the elements). Oates's death leaves only two men still alive, Scott and Dr. Edward Wilson, the team medical officer; both men die shortly after.

The tragedy of Scott and his men, as Bainbridge depicts it, lies in their reckless optimism, their faith in the human capacity to overcome unaided any of nature's challenges. Scott, for example, disdained the use of an adequate number of sled dogs, as if they would give his team an unfair advantage in the race. (Amundsen's success was directly attributable to his ready employment of more than 100 dogs.) As Henry Bowers, Scott's strongest supporter among the crew, puts it, "Far better to stride out, nation against nation, man against man." Their idealism and courage is severely tested in the months to come, but the men, none of whom are plastic saints, suffer and die nobly, but unnecessarily, forerunners of millions of men in the trenches of World War I.

A relatively short novel, The Birthday Boys (1993) tells its story with a cool, spare, precise prose that captures both the beauty of the landscape and the pathos of human failure in an admirable distillation of history, biography, and fiction. Elizabeth Arthur's (1953- ) Antarctic Navigation (1994) is the story of Morgan Lamont, a woman with a lifelong dream of retracing Scott's ill-fated journey. The story traces Morgan's obsession from childhood, when she reads about Scott's 1910 expedition; her imaginative quest is realized some 300 pages later, when the adult Morgan arrives on the continent to confront the "white darkness" of a whiteout, an overwhelming totality of whiteness that renders a person, in effect, snow-blind. Once on the continent, Morgan sets about realizing her dream of recreating Scott's expedition. She succeeds in reaching the Pole, but, as with Scott, the difficulties intensify during the return. Morgan breaks her arm in a fall and gangrene sets in. The result is a race to reach the base camp before amputation becomes necessary. This suspenseful race against time is the most engaging section of the novel.

Had it been content to be an exciting adventure story, Antarctic Navigation would have been a successful example of that genre. As it stands, however, it is overwritten and frequently pretentious in its reflections on topical events, such as Operation Desert Storm and the nature of imperialism. They are clearly meant to add depth and seriousness to a story that doesn't need it.

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