Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

*contains spoilers*

‘The ruin gives absence, so to speak, a material dwelling: a rock-solid site that, paradoxically, embodies a sense that the world is also porous, uncertain, and insubstantial.’ David B. Morris.

I have to say from the outset that I wrote more notes during the reading of this book than I have while reading any other text – which, given its wordcount relative to the likes of War and Peace, Don Quixote, Middlemarch, etc., speaks for itself. That so much can potentially be plumbed from so few words reflects, I think, both the philosophical depths of the content and its relevance to the experiences of those within our time. In fact, it is so densely packed with suggestion that questions and ideas kept irrepressibly springing forth. However, that may also have a lot to do with my own philosophical ponderings at the time of reading. This blog post will only pertain to a few, choice threads which specifically resonated with me; but, be assured, there is so much more that could have been discussed. Dark Matter is a fantastic read, and it has catalysed my interest in certain areas of literary theory that otherwise would have lain dormant.

The Arctic expanse in which events of Michelle Paver’s first foray into adult fiction largely take place is initially conceived as a landscape of ruin and absences – of discarded shacks attached to abandoned mines, from which either nothing of worth was extracted, or what was extracted was not worth enduring the surrounding conditions for much longer. Nonetheless, what the reader is presented with is a sparse history of modern habitation in ancient lands – lands upon which no human person could possibly lay claim. Too empty, wild, and remote are these lands. Emerging into the narrative with no claim upon anything himself, the novel’s protagonist, Jack Miller (whose roots in a ruined middle-class family stand against the upper-class plenitude of his fellow adventurers) is especially mindful of what lies on either side of him in respect of possessions or status in the world of acquisition and social climbing in gilded-age London. On the one, he’s embarking on an expedition amongst a group of ‘haves’, of aristocratic origins and Oxbridge educations, who bring with them the finest supplies one could imagine (lined boots and clothes, lamps and torches, books, electrical equipment, champagne, caviar); on the other, lay the bare icecaps and lonely surrounding oceans where it feels as if no living thing could feasibly survive. Between these polars, of course, stands a complex, contradictory plenitude unto itself: flowers growing from beneath the seemingly barren earth; animals living, playing, and preying amongst one-another both on land and beneath the surface of the sea; and unknown feelings and sightings of a dark figure that threaten the supposed certainty of civilised, educated, sceptical and scientific minds. Claims upon even the most basic groundings of knowledge are therefore brought into question. Can one trust what one sees and hears, let alone what one feels or thinks? And, in the absence of knowledge, can one even make a claim of possessing the structure of thinking that allows for the destabilisation of givens and the presentation of new conceptions of the world and what kinds of beings wander across it (and indeed slink beneath the waves)?

In such alien territory as the Arctic region, where communities exist miles away from one-another in their own respective confines in isolation, the proprietary givens which the social guardrails of western civilisation uphold begin to fall away in the growing wave of silence and darkness, revealing emerging and raw questionings of assumed normalcies:

‘[…] I think I now understand the impulse which drives men to shoot bears […] I think they need to do it. They need to kill that great Arctic totem to give them some sense of control over the wilderness – even if that is only an illusion.’ (P70)

The accustomed belief in modern civilised society is that man has dominion over nature. Indeed, even stretching so vastly before the biblical suggestion in Genesis (1:26) that man, created in God’s image, has ‘dominion over fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’, humans have hunted and tamed animals for their own purposes. And, particularly within the urban confines of 1920s London (from where all the characters journey), animals are to be eaten for sustenance or exterminated as pests – or, of course, their treated skins are to be plucked from hangers in shops to be worn in the latest fashion style. There is no cohabiting with nature in such urban spaces, where humans live to work and socialise, to climb the vocational rungs to the successes of acquired wealth or cultural status. In the Arctic regions, however, there are some creatures that possess the capacity to diminish man’s claim of dominion over them, insisting on their place in the world in spite of human presence and interference. The killing of a bear for these expeditioners, rather than being an act of necessity, then becomes a point of pride. For men to live alongside such a creature is to have their reinforced conception of human superiority put in a deficit; and, to feel at such a loss is to feel existential discomfort. When so much wealth has already been spent on their comfort, for these men to be made to feel wanting in this respect is therefore unacceptable. At this hubristic conundrum, the privileged expeditioners feel compelled to go about asserting themselves, and what emerges in response to this assertion is the question of what their wealth and their university degrees (and even their names) really mean in these lands, where the propriety guidelines that exist to uphold their assumed right to dominion have fallen away. They are truly outside the bounds of their known and lived principles of life at the top of the food chain.

In the absence of so much – of their assumptions about themselves, and when beholding such a remote landscape of desolation – then comes the appearance of the truly unexplainable. Unexplainable at least according to any criteria by which these men of science have established their guardrails. And only the remnants of previous human habitation and the vague outline of a human silhouette can offer points of reference from which to draw any kind of reasoning. As so much more remains unknown and unexplained, delusion begins to take the place of knowledge:

‘I was frightened because I didn’t understand what I saw. Now that I do – or at least have a working hypothesis – I can deal with it.’ (P114)

In order to make the uncertain certain, Jack Miller feels compelled to convince himself he possesses the means by which to explain that which consistently eludes him. Faith in his own sense of the world therefore takes the place of evidence, and delusion becomes the sanctuary from a knowledge that lies outside the bounds of current modes of conception. By this point, Jack is of course all alone. An illness forces the rest of the expeditioners to abandon the camp, leaving Jack with no recourse for dialectical reasoning, as the experiences and viewpoints of the others are as elusive as the mysteries that present themselves in this wilderness. Nonetheless, Jack continues to write about his feelings and experiences, not knowing whether his writings will be discovered or read. That is before Jack then goes on to discover the others’ written journals, and finds that that they too experienced feelings of dread and saw visions of a dark figure – but it was their learned societal propriety (from appearing insane or even silly) that, contrarily, set them all at a distance from one-another, and from conversing about what it is they respectively saw. Social propriety, then, becomes the inhibiting factor that left them remote and desolate from each other, rather than the wrenching context of desolate landscapes and abandoned mines and shacks. It was their own established paradigms that set them on this path to abandonment and ruin.

In the end, following a mystical confrontation and tragedy during their escape, it is that which defies and will ultimately outlive human experience and conception – the sea – which lends itself as the porous material through which Jack continues to maintain his connection with the one member of the expedition who came to mean so much to him: Gus. The sea, which Jack fears most, and which is now the material dwelling for the abandoned ruin of the body of the man he still loves, is nevertheless the likeliest conduit of his expressions of love and devotion, though the expanse of half the globe, the sea’s dark fathoms, and the vale of tears achingly stretch between them. Even in this persistent feeling and act of devotion, Jack is not certain that his message is being received. Certainty, however, is no longer the point. In the same way that Jack wrote so as to think and feel during his panic, without being sure the words would be discovered and read, his feelings for Gus (and the emerging act of love and devotion from it) are all of which he can now be sure in this life. And that is anything but insubstantial.