BOOK OF THE DAY: The Snow TouristBy Charlie English Portobello Books 280pp price £14.99 is reviewed by JOHN S. DOYLE
HAVE YOU ever wondered what to do if you are attacked by a polar bear?
The answer is adopt a crouching position, with your arm and wrist curled in front of your face. The bear can't bite your head because its jaws won't open wide enough to eat the forearm end-on.
Alternatively, curl up into a tight ball and keep very still. Indeed.
This is the kind of thing you will learn from The Snow Tourist, an engaging book that tells you all you want to know about snow - how it forms, how to survive it, the different kinds of avalanche, how to build an igloo, who invented skiing (the Russians, 9,000 years ago). But it is not a mere miscellany or catalogue (though it incorporates an excellent "snow handbook").
Charlie English has the good journalist's ability to absorb a great deal of information and pass it on in a vivid and intelligent way, combining it with his own experiences. He describes the natural world very well.
An understanding employer (the Guardian) and wife (Lucy) indulge his taste for adventure and his "search for the world's purest, deepest snowfall", as the book's subtitle puts it.
English's feeling for snow goes back to a childhood reading of Jack London's Call of the Wild, and Scottish skiing holidays in the 1970s after the death of his father.
The father killed himself when Charlie was 10. A few weeks before he died, he gave the author a photograph of himself as a young man on skis in Austria. It seems he wanted his son "to remember him by this image of youthful euphoria".
The euphoria lives on in Charlie, perhaps prompted by his wife's insisting that they will not move to the country. The call of the wild beckons. In spite of the title of his book, English is not a tourist in the passive, everything-included sense. He gets stuck in, makes his own arrangements, wanders off unaccompanied, gets into situations that cause him fear and panic. And whatever about his subtitle, really only one chapter is devoted to the superlatives (95ft of snow fell in one season at Mount Baker, Washington, in 1998-1999): the rest is about the magic, the romance, the folklore and the art, the science and the practicalities of snow.
Most of his readers in the temperate zones, I suspect, will be like myself, admirers of this extreme snow madness in theory and from a distance, as we curl up with the book by a roaring fire, or loll in the comfort of an electric blanket.
We relish our own occasional encounters with snow because they are occasional. I remember on Christmas morning in 1980 walking down Fifth Avenue in New York City from a long way uptown with a friend I had come to visit, looking for dinner in the Rainbow Room. There was no transport, and no cars or people about, both because it was Christmas Day and because of the snow - a record fall, my friend later told me (though English doesn't concur). The city was quiet and new, and the air froze on its way down your throat.
The transformative quality of snow - "letters from the sky", in the phrase of the Japanese nuclear physicist Nakaya, but also the "delightful horrour" experienced by a 17th-century English visitor to the Alps - is what appeals to the author.
He explores it with the Inuit igloo-makers in Canada, and the hermit-like back-country skier in Valdez, Alaska; with the Washingtonian snow-measurers, and the unforgiving Chamonix guide who addresses him superciliously as "Mr Journalist" but whose teachings pervade this compelling and paradoxically heart-warming book.
John S Doyle is a freelance journalist