Clara’s Verdict
There are writers who are good at research and writers who are good at storytelling, and then there are the rare few who are genuinely accomplished at both. Michael Palin belongs in the third category, and Erebus: The Story of a Ship is among the best things he has written. The subject – the Victorian naval vessel that twice ventured into the extreme edges of the known world, and then vanished in the Canadian Arctic along with all 129 of her crew – is extraordinary on its own terms. In Palin’s hands, with his characteristic ability to make the past feel present and to find the human detail within the historical record, it becomes something close to essential.
The fact that he narrates it himself is part of the pleasure. That voice – curious, gently wry, with genuine feeling behind its composure – is inseparable from the experience of his travel writing, and it brings the same quality to this more formally historical project. Bill Bryson called it “beyond terrific.” He is not wrong.
About the Audiobook
Erebus had two extraordinary lives before she disappeared. The first took her further south than any vessel had previously gone, as part of James Clark Ross’s Antarctic expedition of 1839-1843 – an enterprise that mapped previously unknown coastlines and discovered what is now called the Ross Ice Shelf. The second sent her north, as part of the Franklin expedition of 1845, in search of the Northwest Passage. She never came back.
For 165 years, the fate of Erebus and her sister ship Terror was one of the great mysteries of naval history. Then, in 2014, Erebus was found – preserved in the cold water of the Arctic, largely intact. Palin, already fascinated by the ship’s history, uses the discovery as the occasion for a full account of her two voyages, the men who sailed her, and the world they inhabited.
The result is both a gripping adventure narrative and a social history: of the Victorian Royal Navy, of the culture of exploration and its human cost, of the communities in the Arctic who encountered the expedition’s survivors and whose oral histories provided crucial evidence for later researchers. At 11 hours and 5 minutes, it is a substantial and richly textured listen, accompanied by a PDF with additional reference material.
The Narration
Palin reading his own work is, as with Tolle and Macintyre in this collection, the definitive version. His voice carries the natural cadences of a man who thinks in stories, and he brings both the comic relief (particularly around the ornithologist Robert McCormick, whose passion for collecting birds at the expense of everything else provides some of the book’s best moments) and the solemn weight of the Franklin expedition’s end with equal conviction. The pauses are well-judged; the pace is generous without ever feeling slow. This is what author narration should be.
What Readers Say
With a 4.6 rating from 6 reviews, the audiobook is consistently praised for the quality of both the writing and the narration. “Magisterial,” wrote The Times. “Beyond terrific,” said Bryson. Reader reviews describe it as “completely out of my normal genre but fascinating,” and as an account that is “very well researched and written just as you would expect from Michael Palin.” Several readers note that the courage of the men involved – sailors who signed up for expeditions into genuinely unknown territory, knowing some would not return – is rendered movingly rather than as abstract heroism. “Hard to forget the courage shown as they dealt with all the forces nature threw against them.”
Who Should Listen?
Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in Victorian history, naval exploration, or the particular kind of heroism that sends people into extreme environments without adequate preparation. Fans of Palin’s travel writing will find all his characteristic virtues present – the curiosity, the humour, the ability to make the distant feel intimate. Those who enjoyed the BBC series The Terror (based on Dan Simmons’s fictional account of the same expedition) will find this the essential factual companion.
Listen to Erebus: The Story of a Ship on Audible UK – a magnificent piece of narrative history, narrated by its author with warmth and intelligence.
