Mr Grønmark's Feeling for Snow

I stayed up far too late last night, reading Lionel Davidson’s 1962 thriller, The Rose of Tibet. An Englishman is searching for his brother who has gone missing on a film shoot in Tibet (the main action of the book is set in 1950 before murderous communist swine stole the country). 

He is trying to reach Tibet from India on foot, bicycle and mule, guided by a teen-aged Sherpa. It contains a heart-stopping description of an horrendous journey across mountains in a snow storm, at the end of which Ringling, the prayer-chanting Sherpa boy, grins as he points to a stunted little bush. The scene ends with the lines: 

“It was a bit of spiney, leathery life, and it was growing there. They had come out of the lifeless land.”

I’ll save my homage to Davidson – perhaps the greatest thriller-writer of all time – for another day. (Phillip Pullman called Davidson’s last masterpiece, Kolymsky Heights, set in snow-bound Siberia, the best thriller he had ever read.) But reading The Rose of Tibet set me thinking about how much I enjoy snow in fiction, poetry and art. After all, it almost made up for George Lazenby’s performance in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – and that’s saying something. 

My favourite snow-bound thriller is Hammond Innes’s The Land God Gave To Cain set in Labrador. I suspect that Innes is now largely forgotten, but, if so, that’s unfair: his sheer attention to detail, his believability, and his ability to evoke wild, frozen landscapes was exemplary. While he later became famous for thrillers set at sea, three of the four earliest film adaptations of his work wereSnowbound, The Lonely Skier and The White South – not a beach person, one suspects. 

When I was a lad in Norway, my mother told me the tale of a Norwegian war hero hiding from the Germans in a self-constructed igloo, who, in order to stop himself dying of gangrene, had to hack off his own toes with a knife. This image stayed with me (as you’d expect), but in later years I tended to view it as some form of Norwegian folk tale updated to the Second World War. 

One lunchtime about ten years ago, recovering from a morning of BBC training, I came across We Die Alone, a non-fiction WW2 adventure story by former spymaster David Howarth. It tells the tale of three young Norwegians smuggled back into Norway for a spot of sabotage in 1943, a mission which goes horribly wrong. Jan Baalsrud goes on the run, chased by the occupying Nazis. On page 194 of the Canongate paperback  edition, I came across a detailed description of Jan, armed with a pocket knife, a few fingers of brandy, and some cod-liver oil ointment, hacking off nine of his toes over a three day period. 

This is the most astonishing tale of courage, determination, endurance and sheer human decency I have ever read. (And sorry for doubting you, Mum.) Interestingly (well, to me, at least) is that David Howarth’s previous non-fiction work was The Shetland Bus: my Scottish grandmother made a brief appearance in the film version, shot in Norway in 1954 (Norwegian title: Shetlandsgjengen). 

Back to fiction, and there’s the snowstorm which traps Mr. Lockwood overnight at Wuthering Heights, and leads to Catherine Linton’s frozen hand clasping him through the window of the room in which he’s sleeping, and her chilling words: “I’m come home: I’d lost my way on the moor!” (In the film version, at the end, Heathcliff follows Cathy’s ghost across the snow-covered moor to his doom.) And there’s the chase across the Arctic wastes near the conclusion of Frankenstein -“I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost...” (a brilliant section which unfortunately rarely makes it into filmed versions). And there’s C.S. Lewis’s snow-bound Narnia – later, Lewis revealed in his autobiographical work, Surprised By Joy, how, in childhood, he had been in thrall to a vision of The North: ice, snow, cold, whiteness, purity and silence. And Jack London brought Canada’s chill vastness alive in White Fang and Call of the Wild: as a child, these were the first novels to hold me spellbound.

Talking of poetry - which I wasn’t – one of my all-time favourites, and the one I find myself reciting most often (to myself, I hasten to add) is Robert Frost’s beautiful and deeply moving “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”, whose third and fourth stanzas go as follows (the “He” is the poet’s horse, in case there’s any doubt):

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep. 

“…easy wind and downy flake” is simply perfect - how well one knows that sensation - as is the impression of the weary, plodding, dutiful turning away from a scene of beauty conveyed by the repeated penultimate line.

As for films, there’s the Eisenstein classic, Alexander Nevsky, and the Battle on the Ice - one of the most stunning sequences ever filmed, accompanied by Prokofiev’s magical score.

As for films, there’s the 1951 Science Fiction/Horror classic, The Thing From Another World, where a rampant alien terrorizes the inhabitants of an Antarctic research station – “An intellectual carrot. The mind boggles”. And John Carpenter’s stunning 1980’s remake, The Thing, starring Kurt Russell – a bizarrely under-rated genre masterpiece (warning: you can link to a key scene from the film here, but please don’t watch if you‘re eating - it’s truly revolting). And, of course, there’s always the 1948 Scott of the Antarctic, and its accompanying Vaughan Williams score, which he later turned into Sinfonia Antarctica – the celesta conjures up snow and ice to great effect. And the 1937 film version of James Hilton’s great novel, Lost Horizon, has some fabulous snow scenes, but only in snatches.

Finally, paintings: here, I’ll fly the flag for Norway by mentioning two masterpieces by Harald Sohlberg. A print of Vinternatt I Rondane hangs just outside my office – if you look very closely, you’ll see there’s a faintly glowing  cross visible on the dark face of the highest peak, a glimmer of warmth in that chill immensity. And, although not quite wild enough to qualify for this round-up, the same artist’s Gate I Roros is too beautiful to exclude. (In case I’m accused of partisanship, there’s also Goya’ powerful The Snow Storm.) 

As for TV, there’s always Joanna Lumley’s alluring programme about her search for the Northern Lights.

There’s more – so much more – but these are just a few of the works that sprang to mind after I finally managed to shut The Rose of Tibet last night.