A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard by Sara Wheeler Hardcover: 388 pages Publisher: Jonathan Cape (8 Nov 2001) Language English VG in DW Cherry indicates that Sara Wheeler's love affair with Antarctica shows no signs of diminishing. After the success of Terra Incognita, her story of seven months in the Antarctic, she has now turned her attentions to a biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the surviving members of Scott's ill-starred South Pole expedition and the author of one of the few truly enduring works of Polar literature, The Worst Journey in the World. Wheeler's achievement here is to transcend her subject's limitations to search for his nobility of spirit. The portrait that emerges is of a man tortured by his internal contradictions. Cherry-Garrard was a conservative of the old school, a gentleman amateur brought up to believe in the divine right of the aristocracy. But this view was shot through with a curious modernism; much as he deplored the ever-growing demands of the working class, he still recognised their right to a better quality of life. Similarly, he found himself out of step with many of his class over the futility of the war, and yet he suffered from guilt and anxiety over his inability to participate due to invalidity.
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