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The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge, Duckworth, pp 189, £12.99

Well into the 1960s, my schoolmasters solemnly taught that Amundsen
– he merited neither rank nor Christian name – beat Captain Robert Falcon
Scott to the South Pole only by the most dastardly trickery.

Luckily, no era set itself up for debunking quite as much as the final
decades of the British Empire. By the 1970s, the line ‘I am just going outside
and may be some time,’ had launched a thousand comic sketches. In 1979,
Roland Huntford’s Scott and Amundsen (later republished as The Last Place
On Earth) completed the job by portraying Scott as a self-deluding romantic
whose incompetence cost lives.

Beryl Bainbridge leans heavily on Huntford and the more veiled criticism
of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World for her fictional
first-person portraits of the five men who died returning from the South
Pole in the autumn of 1912. Scott’s companions are the boozy and loyal
Evans, saintly Wilson, cheerful Bowers – and Oates, stoic and aloof to the
end. The theme of birthdays celebrated in extraordinary circumstances casts
a suitably juvenile light on their characters.

However, Bainbridge keeps her novelist’s licence oddly in check by shying
away from issues that Polar historians still debate: the sudden choice to
take five men to the Pole, for example, and the exact circumstances of the
deaths of Evans and Oates. Probably only one episode, an instant of unrequited
homosexual attraction, will raise real hackles among the old guard of the
British Antarctic Survey. My great disappointment was that Bainbridge did
not work harder at the character of Edward Wilson, doctor, ornithologist,
artist and Christian, the ‘Uncle Bill’ upon whose shoulder the other birthday
boys lean.

Bainbridge is not the first person to borrow Scott’s story. Whether
to ridicule or imitate, we still enlist the spirit of Scott’s men on our
own winter journeys, 80 years after their blood congealed into black ice.

Michael Cross is a freelance journalist.