Hamilton Wende interviews Darrel Bristow-Bovey on ‘Finding Endurance’ | A deep dive into memory, imagination and storytelling

Finding Endurance *****

Darrel Bristow-Bovey 

Jonathan Ball Publishers 

“I grew up on the Bluff in Durban,” Darrel Bristow-Bovey tells me. “It always felt like being somewhere on the edge of the world, like being washed up. So I don’t have a home, and in the last few years I have been investigating what this means for me.”

It is this fascination with the strange places we find ourselves in and the meanings we give them that led him to write one of the most engaging books I have ever read.

At first glance it is a wonderful account of the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s third and failed expedition on the icy continent. Shackleton and his commander Robert Scott had been beaten to the pole in 1911 by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. In 1914, as World War 1 was breaking out, he set off south again, hoping to cross the entire continent on foot. This mission was doomed from early on. Their hardy ship, the Endurance, froze into the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, was crushed and sank. Only to be rediscovered on the ocean floor in 2022 by a ship captained by South African Knowledge Bengu.

If you only read one book about Shackleton and his brave obsession with the Antarctic, make it this one. The narrative of the expedition is gripping and illuminated with moments of gem-like clarity and insight.

However, its allure lies equally in the parallel inner journey of that uncertain child from the Bluff finding his way into adulthood in his father’s shadow.

After a tragically casual playground accident, his father had a series of strokes which debilitated him and, stuck at home, he would tell his young son stories. Many were about his supposed experiences on Shackleton’s expedition. They fascinated the boy, but of course none of them were true. His father was not even born when Shackleton sailed for the ice fields.

Here the narrative delves deep indeed. “The human heart,” Bristow-Bovey writes, “has space for opposite things.” As he describes the perilous, shifting light and mirages of the Antarctic winter over a century ago, so too, the Fata Morgana of the writer’s memory and imagination lead us into the human soul.

“I know he was on Shackleton’s expedition.” Bristow-Bovey insists. He uses Shackleton’s resolute voyage as a metaphor for the simple but courageous lives of his father and mother,who struggled to keep the family alive when his father became too sick to work. “The stories we tell ourselves, true or not, are always real. We make meaning from the stories,” he writes.

And for Bristow-Bovey, the story Shackleton told himself makes all the difference.

“When Shackleton came back he was considered to be a failure, never made it to the South Pole, never crossed the Antarctic; but to me, and in the 21st century, it’s reimagined as successful. He embodied a spirit of endurance and optimism. Once the ship sank, he no longer thought of his original goal. He told himself a different story, understood that he now had a new adventure — to bring everybody back alive, and he did.”

Bristow-Bovey glances away as the power of his words — of his story — rises inside him. “My father in many ways considered himself a failure, but in writing this I made a reappraisal of his life. When my mother was pregnant with me, he was diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live, and he did what Shackleton did. He changed his goal, learnt a new trade and started making money that he could leave to my mother. He died of something completely different 10 years later.”

Bristow-Bovey looks back. “That’s how I think we should live. What’s important is the sense of my father being a hero. He had the echoes of failure, but he was wrestling with what it meant to be living his life.”

Shackleton too wrestled with living his life in the dangers of Antarctica. Above all, he wanted to bring his men home, whatever that place might mean to each of them.

On the last leg of his journey he set off with two others to cross the icy peaks of South Georgia Island. Dehydrated, suffering from frostbite, no sleep and extreme hunger, they finally found their way to an isolated whaling station, and help.

“It seemed to me often,” Shackleton wrote of that final, desperate mountain trek, “that we were four, not three.” Science might diagnose that strange doppelgänger as a hallucination. He felt how hard it was to “describe things intangible”. It was, however, “a subject very near to our hearts”. It was, of course, yet another story, but it was one Shackleton and his companions all told when they finally came home. Perhaps it wasn’t real, but it was certainly true.

Click here to buy the book