Ransmayr’s novel is based on a real event, the Austro-Hungarian expedition to the North Pole in 1872—74 that charted the land beyond Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya, and discovered Franz Joseph Land, naming it after the Austrian emperor. Their ship, the Tegetthoff, became locked in the pack ice and the expedition had to over-winter in the Arctic, eventually abandoning the Tegetthoff and making their way back in a desperate journey in the lifeboats. They reached the Norwegian coast after over two years on the Arctic ice.

Ransmayr makes use of existing documents, reports, diaries, letters and memoirs by members of the expedition. Much of the story of the journey is told in the words of the men who took part in it. The book also includes illustrations, engravings taken from the leader’s report.

Interwoven with this reconstruction of a real expedition is the fictional account of a young man who becomes obsessed with the story of the polar journey and eventually sets off to retrace its steps. The fictional figure is a young Italian laborer called Mazzini who lives in Vienna; Ransmayr presumably chose that nationality because the ordinary seamen on the Tegetthoff came from Italy. While the expedition eventually returned, Mazzini disappears without trace in the Arctic wasteland.

The skilfully interwoven narratives build up into a compelling picture of the inhospitable polar region. The strength and courage of the men who confront it are portrayed, but deglamorised in what becomes a desperate struggle simply to survive. Their arrival in the safety of Novaya Zemlya is not the glorious homecoming of a band of heroes, but the last gasp of an exhausted and disenchanted crew for whom survival had become no longer a hope, but a mere continuation of mechanical movements.

The physical and emotional deprivations of the journey contrast with the ecstatic reception the members of the expedition received on their way home across Germany to Vienna. The armchair explorers could still bathe in the national glory and adventure which Ransmayr’s chronicle reveals as an illusion.

‘Since most of Novaya Zemlya’s coast is unapproachable, we were forced to continue our journey without stopping, although our arms were stiff and swollen with the constant exertion of rowing... We rowed on mechanically through the endless flood, towards the secret of how all this would end. (Julius Payer)

On 24 August 1874, at seven in the evening, with only a breeze from the southwest, crews on the Russian whalers Vasily and Nikolai anchored in Duna Bay off Novaya Zemlya see four boats approaching but hear no sounds of jubilation, only the slap of the oars. They recognize the flags and realize that these are the missing men who are the talk of the Arctic harbour towns. Some of these foreigners cannot climb the gangway of the Nikolai on their own and have to be helped. Without a word Weyprecht hands Captain Feodor Voronin the safe-conduct letter issued by the tsar in St. Petersburg. Into the silence Voronin haltingly reads aloud that Tsar Alexander II commands the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition to the care of his subjects, and the Russian sailors bare their heads and sink to their knees before these emaciated strangers whose faces are disfigured by ulcers and frostbite.’ p185