Icetopia [Paperback]

I had not heard of Camp Century before reading Arthur Herzog’s Icetopia. Camp Century was a city built beneath the ice of a glacier on Greenland in the late sixties. And although it was a real, ice-and-mortar kind of place, Herzog’s prose is equally embedded in the crossroads of fact and fiction that I can not be certain of history’s true events. This much seems to be historical fact: in the paranoid, mutually assured destruction days during the cold war, the United States Army enlisted volunteers to inhabit the city and take part in an experiment, the outcome of which would determine whether life was sustainable beneath the ice. This was at the height of the cold war, and some volunteers tacitly assumed that if there was a nuclear disaster, they would surely be among what few survivors there would be. In Icetopia, the project disintegrates when the glacier shifts four months into the experiment, and all contact with Camp Century is lost. In truth, Camp Century seems to have been abandoned when the subterranean city built by the corps of engineers started to shift in a seismologically precarious way.
Herzog’s novel opens in a placid 1995 – the cold war is over, and Joseph Pike (with his Inuit guide) are searching for what remains of Camp Century. Incredibly, they discover the community under the ice thriving independently of contact with the world outside. They are governed by Adam, their “Snow Father” and Eva, the “Glacier Mother.” For years they believed that there was a nuclear war and that the earth was contaminated, so they remained underground, living in what became an “Icetopia.” Now Adam is determined not to let the arrival of Pike and the Inuit change or destroy what has been created under his guidance.
Herzog’s novel is a headlong foray into a hidden world that evokes a familiar theme in literature, the isolated community that has been breached unwelcomely by outsiders. One thinks of Hilton’s Lost Horizon, or the dystopian fare proffered by more conventional science fiction. What sets Herzog apart from a more B-movie approach is his lucid prose, and the intricate detail he bestows to his descriptions of the ageing Camp Century. His acknowledgements include a number of contacts, military personnel, scientists, etc, who have some connection to the nonfiction Icetopia. When I was describing to novel’s premise to a friend, he said that it reminded him of how Japanese soldiers had been found on remote south pacific islands, armed and ready, for as long as thirty years after the end of the Second World War. Many of them had continued to practice their traditional customs but also started new and unusual ones as well, all while keeping reverent toward their empire, which of course had long since distintegrated.
That’s one of the many interesting things about Herzog- his ideas bridge the gap between what seems like a fantastic James Bond premise, a missing city under the ice, and the reminder that truth is often stranger than fiction, like the lost Japanese soldiers- so much that he leaves the reader unsure of the truth. This book is so plausible in this sense that it made me want to charter a huge, decommissioned soviet icebreaker to find the remains of Camp Century, and to see who may be calling the place home these days.

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