3,5 stars

I didn’t know what to expect from this book. I decided to read it because I was seduced by the title and the subject. I have always had a fascination with glaciers. It is not just that they are spectacular, there is something haunting and powerful about them too.

Everywhere on Earth ice is changing. Glaciers vary in response to changes in global and regional climate, but worldwide, most mountain glaciers are retreating. The disintegration of ice-shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula, over the last few decades, has destabilized on-shore glaciers. Arctic sea-ice has thinned significantly. From the Arctic to Peru, from Switzerland to Himalayas, glaciers and ice fields are disappearing fast.

The Library of Ice is not a book about climate change and its effect on glaciers around the world. Mostly it a person’s quest to understand ice. It began in Upernavik in Greenland within an open-air museum that reveals  colonial and Viking histories. Nancy Campbell, a poet and a writer, spent two months there as a residence writer in 2010. It was in Upernavik that she found herself paying closer attention to the way the glaciers shaped 
the landscape, the lives and the language of the people who lived in Greenland. Fascinated by the ice, she would spend the next seven years wandering in cold places, examining the impact of ice on people’s lives at a time when it is itself under threat from climate change. “The Arctic ice had become an obsession that would not release me,” she writes. 

    “What is about you and cold places, anyway? people ask me. I needed an answer to the question that didn’t require an all-night conversation over several glasses of wine.” 

The Library of Ice is not just a memoir from Campbell’s seven years wanderings and residencies on cold places. It is also a cultural and social history of ice. The lives and the language of local people, their culture and spirituality,  have developed in harmony with the surrounding ecosystem. There is no doubt that these societies are experiencing unprecedented shifts in their livelihoods due to climate change.

This is a deeply personal and beautiful book, a quest of a writer to rediscover creativity and purpose in a radically transformed landscape.

This was quite a meandering book, Nancy Campbell would be writing about something and then suddenly move onto to something else, the book seems to behave like an iceberg in that it will go where it wants.  The writing is so interesting that I was left wondering if those tangents actually ended and the initial subject was returned too.  I honestly can't remember, but it doesn't matter because there is so much here that you don't feel like you've missed out on anything.

The book starts off with Nancy giving up her job because she gets offered a place as resident artist in Upernavik, Greenland, she falls in love with the place and that becomes the start of a seven year obsession with ice.  The most amazing thing for me is how ice has managed to get itself involved in so many areas of life.  Art, books, music, film, science, adventure, history and myth, there is so much of it that I was impressed it was possible to fit it into one book.  I did spend a lot of time googling some of the more interesting facts.

If you want to read a comprehensive collection about ice then this is the place for you.

I opted to slip Nancy Campbell’s memoir cum scientific and social history of ice into my backpack when taking a cruise from Liverpool to the Norwegian Fjords. Rather absurdly, my journey commenced in mid-July when there was more chance of sighting ice in the chef’s lemon sorbet than through the porthole in my cabin (although, there were smudges of snow visible on the distant mountain tops), however, I felt compelled to read something vaguely Nordic while touring the region.

As it happened, I was immensely pleased with my choice. The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate follows the author over a seven-year-period as she travels from the world’s northernmost museum at Upernavik in Greenland to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, scooting off at various points to visit a variety of chilly places such as Iceland and Antarctica. Thankfully the freakish heatwave affecting parts of Scandinavia at the time of my trip did not in the least spoil my pleasure in this insightful book. In fact, it absorbed me completely during the long days at sea.

Campbell scrutinizes her subject from the perspective of a writer. In her quest to record the effects of climate change on harsh but stunning environments she is drawn into the lives of the people she meets, developing an intense fascination with their beliefs and traditions. Her enthusiasm is contagious and left me hankering to visit some of the locations she so vividly describes.

The Library of Ice is an enchanting though objective account of the author’s icy wanderings, from remote Arctic settlements to dusty archives containing histories of doomed polar expeditions. It’s intriguing, poetic in parts, and the perfect book to accompany one on a voyage to the land of Trolls, Vikings and the midnight sun.

Enjoyably discursive and digressive, at the expense of coherency and momentum occasionally. Many of the tangents are fascinating, but some border on tenuous.

From her home in Oxford, Nancy Campbell spent 7 years overall travelling to locations across the world in what I can only describe as a pilgrimage to discover all she can about ice, its composition, its effect upon our world, its uses, the secrets it hides, and to follow the trails of those who have explored it as well as those who have learned to live and survive on it.  Starting in Greenland, she spends months living in a museum in Upernavik, to which it has taken her 3 days to travel, learning about the science of ice - she nearly lost me there! - and the Greenlanders extensive knowledge of it.  She seems to have a knack of finding artists’ refuges and grants that allow her to travel and live in places conducive to study and writing - Iceland, the Netherlands, the amazing Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland where she lives in an architecturally designed tree house.  With her, we learn about the battles fought by Arctic and Antarctic explorers to overcome the barriers that ice in its many forms put in their way, about those who record the acoustics of ice and turn it into music, about the technology required to create the perfect curling rink, about perfectly preserved bodies found in glaciers, and about the harvesting of ice on Thoreau’s Walden Pond which made millions for the early 19th century entrepreneur who perfected the technique of preserving it so that it could be shipped to Madras and Bombay to be served at the tables of high ranking officials.

This is a book that twists and turns through its story.  Campbell has mined the topic of ice to produce a fascinating, eclectic compendium.  She writes very well and clearly loves her subject.  Highly recommended.

An enjoyable and interesting book that is part memoir and part popular science book. An exploration of the cultural history of ice.