In 1879, Henry James famously complained that the US offered little in the way of useful raw material for the serious writer. Compared to Europe, his homeland seemed a place of absences: “no country gentlemen, no palaces, nor manors, nor old country houses … no great universities nor public schools.” James’s lack of patriotism was condemned at the time, and his remarks may seem snobbish and old-fashioned, but he does have a point. Novelists need something to get their teeth into, and what they most often bite down on is culture. Without culture, in the broad sense of that word, what is there left for a novelist to write about? It’s as reasonable a question now, I think, as it was in 1879, and it’s certainly a question faced by anyone thinking of setting a novel above the Arctic Circle (a place where, even its fondest champions would have to confess, country gentlemen and great public schools tend to be few and far between).

The Arctic, as it is imagined by most novelists on this list, is a place at the edge of, or beyond, culture. But this, despite James’s warning, doesn’t mean it is without potential as a literary setting. It just means that it encourages, or allows, a particular kind of writing – a writing more concerned with extremes and limit cases than with the subtle details of social interaction. The high Arctic becomes a version of the heath in Shakespeare’s King Lear: the place where the superficial and inessential is stripped away, and we are left with something much more raw and basic.

That’s certainly how I came to think about the Arctic as setting when I was writing my latest novel The North Water, a book about a murderer on a 19th-century Arctic whaling ship. The story is set in and around Baffin Bay, the stretch of sea and ice between east coast of Canada and the west coast of Greenland, and by placing my characters in that extraordinarily harsh and empty landscape in winter I was able to explore one of the questions that first provoked the novel: what is it (if anything) that makes a human being human?



1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Shelley’s novel ends somewhere near the North Pole, with the vengeful Victor Frankenstein driving his dog sled across the ice in an attempt to hunt down and kill the monster he has created. It is loneliness and a lack of human warmth that has made the monster monstrous, of course – he wants a wife but Victor refuses to make him one – and the bleak and empty landscape becomes the suitable final symbol of his terrible solitude.

2. The Balloonist by MacDonald Harris

A Swedish aeronaut with mystical tendencies attempts to reach the North Pole by hydrogen balloon. The year is 1897, and modernisms of various kinds are in the air. Harris’s little-known novel is philosophically serious and frequently funny. Gustav, the protagonist and first-person narrator, has an arch, Nabokovian wit, and the theories he serves up about life and ballooning are provocative and plentiful.

3. The Rifles by William T Vollmann

A wild, disorientating blend of reportage, history, historical fiction and oblique autobiography, The Rifles is volume six of Seven Dreams, Vollmann’s enormous and as yet unfinished account of the history of North American landscape. The protagonist, Captain Subzero, is a reincarnation (sort of) of John Franklin, the British explorer who famously disappeared while seeking the Northwest Passage. If you like Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis, this is probably your kind of Arctic novel.

4. House of Meetings by Martin Amis

The Siberian gulag novel might be considered a sub-genre of the Arctic novel proper. In its descriptions of the cruelty and brutality of everyday life in a Soviet-era prison camp, House of Meetings shows the influence of classic works by Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. But in its complex, startling and often moving consideration of the psycho-sexual consequences of living under such dehumanising conditions, the novel is pure Amis.

5. Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean

An old-school 60s thriller set aboard a US nuclear submarine travelling below the Arctic ice pack. No women, no sex, very little explicit violence, but lots of details about submarine engineering, and plenty of strong, laconic men in situations of extreme peril. MacLean’s sentences are sometimes clunky and his characters (even the Americans) talk and think like Battle of Britain Spitfire pilots. But the plot is a juggernaut, and what other novel shows us the Arctic from underneath?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ernest Borgnine in the 1968 film version of Ice Station Zebra. Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar

6. The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett

Barrett’s novel takes John Franklin’s famous lost expedition as its starting point. The Narwhal leaves Philadelphia in 1855 in search of evidence of the fate of Franklin and his crew, but soon runs into difficulties of its own. The story shuttles intriguingly between the struggles of the men in Baffin Bay and those of the women left at home, and raises interesting questions about the ethics and psychology of Arctic exploration.

7. The Call of the Wild by Jack London

Impossible to leave this one off the list. London’s work has the typical strengths and weaknesses of turn-of-the-century naturalist fiction – it’s powerful and gripping, but the ideas (a pinch of Nietzsche and Rousseau, and a large helping of Darwin) are very much of their time. In Call of the Wild, Buck the canine protagonist starts as a pampered pet in sunny California and ends up in the Yukon taking down caribou and running with the wolves. Or in other words: Nature 1, Nurture 0.

8. The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny

A quietly audacious historical novel that uses John Franklin’s life and career as the basis for some light-handed but absorbing philosophising. The slowness of the title refers specifically to Franklin’s extremely subdued and careful manners, and his disconcerting habit of pausing for a long time before answering any question, but it also comes to stand for a certain way of seeing and responding to the world. Being fast means relying on pre-existing ideas and assumptions; being slow means being open to seeing the world in new ways.

9. Unformed Landscape by Peter Stamm

Stamm’s beautiful short novel manages to be extraordinary while appearing to be quite plain. The writing is clean and simple and the story straightforward – a woman, Katherine, leaves her home in the far north of Norway after realising her husband is a liar, travels as far south as Paris, then returns to find a new partner – but every observation is emotionally acute, and (in Michael Hoffman’s excellent translation) every sentence rings completely true.

10. Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson

Rupert Thomson’s most recent novel echoes the structure and some of the concerns of Stamm’s Unformed Landscape. Both novels trace longitudinal journeys of female self-discovery. But while in Stamm’s novel the main journey is from north to south, in Katherine Carlyle the protagonist, a young English woman bewildered by the death of her mother and the strangeness of her own IVF-assisted birth, leaves the warmth of Italy and travels north. She travels first to Berlin, and eventually to Outrograd a dismal mining town in Arctic Russia where the story reaches its uncertain conclusion.

• The North Water by Ian McGuire is published by Scribner, priced £14.99. It is available from the Guardian bookshop for £11.99 with free p&p.