The Rifles

by William T. Vollmann Book 6 in the Seven Dreams series.

Amazon

4.4(11)

In 1845, Sir John Franklin leads HMS Erebus and HMS Terror into the Canadian Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage. The expedition carries the confidence of Victorian science and empire but discounts Inuit experience of the region. When the ships are trapped by ice, Franklin and every member of his command disappear into a disaster reconstructed only through later searches, scattered records and Indigenous testimony.

A second narrative moves through the Arctic in 1990, where the contemporary traveller gradually imagines himself as Franklin reborn and becomes involved with an Inuit woman named Reepah. Past and present merge as environmental hardship, sexual exploitation and cultural dislocation repeat earlier patterns of intrusion. The novel turns the lost expedition into a continuing colonial haunting rather than a closed Victorian mystery.