Endlessness by Tim O'Riley
Endlessness by Tim O’Riley
4-colour offset lithography, 23 x 17 cm
Publisher: Peter Foolen editions (£15)
★★★★☆
Some people can find the truth in a blade of grass. For Tim O’Riley it’s a set of wooden snow skis used by Apsley Cherry-Garrard on the polar expedition to the Antarctic in 1912. I like the thought that the simple blade of grass and the humble ski have an identical formal structure. And just like the blade of grass, Tim uses the ski as pointer to something else; the skis themselves aren’t what’s at stake here, it’s just an object upon which his thoughts are focused.
Endlessness is constructed with ‘interludes’ that compliment the main text. They remind me of how Melville breaks up Moby Dick with scientific chapters or how Steinbeck, in The Grapes of Wrath, follows the story of the Joad family, again interspersed between the migration of hobo travellers working their way across America to supposedly richer pastures.
In Endlessness these ‘interludes’ give depth to the main narrative which describes frighteningly cold temperatures and tests of psychological endurance that one can only imagine took place during the bitter days of the expedition.
However, a set of skis don’t necessarily convey the scars of such a journey. But for Tim, a chance visit to the Royal Geographical Society in London brings the author and skis together. The journey seems to have been doomed to fail right from the outset. That’s the core vibe in the book. A lot of the detail dwells on the mistakes made by the explorers. There’s a British stiff upper lip attitude throughout the narrative along with the divided response as to whether they were heroes or just barking mad. This is compounded by the fact that the Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen got to the South pole almost a month before Scott’s party did adding another layer of gloom to the story.
The text picks up on bad eyesight, bad weather, bad organisation; the whole story is a catalogue of mistakes, failed communication and poor judgement. Without the ‘interludes’ this really would have been a desperate read.
A couple of interesting distractions/interludes come from Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey around my Room, (1795), and Georges Perec’s A Winter Journey, (1995). Both books touch on ideas of absurdity and pointlessness which somehow reflect the nature of the doomed expedition that Apsley Cherry-Garrard found himself on.
The visual apex of the book is a 1:1 scale reproduction of the skis across several pages. I wonder if a kind of concertina fold out might have been more effective? Nonetheless, it’s a high point of the book.
Like a blade of grass, a pair of skis can only get you so close to the truth. But this book is about Endlessness and strange as it may sound, all those diversions and distractions do give a sense of that concept. Once again we’re reminded that a form of truth lies not by looking at something square in the eye, but it’s what’s happening around the edges where the real subject sits.
Chris Tosic
It can be purchased directly from Tim O’Riley’s website here
