The Collector of Lost Things

Moody and affecting prose buoys this strange and troubling account of an Arctic ocean voyage to the end of the earth, and the end of a species. Naturalist Eliot Saxby sails forth on the Amethyst in 1845 in an attempt to find surviving specimens of the Great Auk, a large waterfowl hunted to extinction, but the expedition quickly becomes an interior exploration of connections among the ship's officers, passengers, and captain, a troubled lot. Saxby is drawn to Clara, a mysterious figure who accompanies her cousin Bletchley, a novice gentleman hunter, but he is haunted by his previous history with this frail, troubled woman, whom he knows as Celeste. Her reasons for being aboard the ship are as arbitrary as Saxby's, whose mission is undertaken to settle a wager between unnamed gentlemen in a London club. The oppressive shipboard atmosphere builds in a somewhat overwrought manner reminiscent of 19th century gothic novels, but Page's descriptions of being under sail, and of the harsh and beautiful setting of the Arctic regions are gorgeous. Equally powerful passages about the reality of hunting and collecting are unsettling, from a brutal depiction of a seal hunt to the senseless killing of a pair of whales. The tension between Saxby's starkly defined moral sensibilities and the commercial motivations of the volatile Captain Sykes and his crew gives way to the narrator's own interior struggles, which are more complex than they first appear to be. (Dec.)