The Still Point by Amy Sackville
Arctic explorer Edward Mackley embarks on a journey to the North Pole around the turn of the 20th century, but he disappears into the frozen tundra without a trace. He leaves his young bride Emily behind, who waits for his return for years while her hopes and devotion slowly morph into strict widowhood. One hundred years later, on a steamy midsummer day, Edward’s great-grandniece Julia wanders through the old family home, making an effort to organize the jumble of inherited possessions and memories from that disastrous journey while taking care to overlook the growing fissures in her own marriage.
However, as the day progresses into night, Julia learns something that shatters her long-held perception of Edward and Emily’s affection, and her husband Simon is forced to make a hasty decision that will determine the course of their relationship. “The Still Point,” a remarkable literary debut and a touching reflection on the emotional and physical distances that can exist between two people, is keenly observed and utterly captivating.
The Still Point by Amy Sackville
Amazon.com
The protagonist, Julia, is an Arctic explorer’s great-great niece. She’s made the decision to write the biography of her great-great-uncle Edward Mackley because she has enough money and doesn’t have to work very hard. His tale and her experience are told in tandem, and as the novel progresses, it becomes clear how much of what he did and the legends about what he did gave her a sense of identity. It accomplishes numerous tasks at once, which accounts for its confidence.
One of them is that it flits in and out of the present, so sometimes we agree with Julia and other times we hear someone say, “Dear Reader, look at these folks, they’re behaving pretty strangely.” The other is that it walks a very delicate line between realizing how the crucial family is to your identity and realizing how absurd it is to base your opinions on those of a great-great-uncle you have never met. Due to the fact that it is about family, which is in some ways an outdated issue, this is an odd topic for a debut novel. In reality, there are considerable parallels between it and The Spider Truces.
Sackville’s first book tackles not only the separation between an Arctic explorer and his wife waiting at home but also two other types of separation simultaneously—a parallel between this late Victorian couple and another one over a century later, as well as the spectre of emotional separation between husband and wife—is fascinating (though perhaps a little overambitious). We know Edward Mackley will not return after mounting a two-year expedition to the North Pole in 1899 in an effort to establish his reputation as an explorer. He married Emily, a young woman, just before he left, and she spent the remainder of her long life in the Surrey home of her brother-in-law John Mackley.
Julia, the great-granddaughter of John, who works as an archivist and is attempting to put together the tale of Emily and Edward’s sad love affair, has now inherited that house. Her ten-year-old spouse Simon is currently travelling to work in the City. There are obviously more themes and contrasts at work. Simon, like Edward’s brother John, is systematic and analytical and is a collector of butterflies who mounts and meticulously catalogues them. Julia, like Edward, is a romantic who yearns for the unreachable. Even though he and Julia are in love, their temperamental differences cause some tension in their marriage.
There are two primary narratives in Amy Sackville’s The Still Point. In the first, we follow Julie Mackley as she takes possession of the ancestral home that has been in her family for many years. The most fascinating items are the stuffed animals in the attic, which allow Julie to relive the lives of her departed ancestors as she makes her way through the house sorting through the dust, dirt, and debris. We also find out more about Julie and Simon’s less-than-perfect union. The second story tells us more about her great-uncle Edward Mackley, an adventurous adventurer who went to the North Pole in the late 1800s but never came back.
