Impossible Journey

Heinrich Schlögel, son of a prosperous German hop farmer, and his sister Inge first encounter the Arctic as children in the early 1970s, in books. Inge begins teaching herself Inuktitut from a kit she found in the school cafeteria, and Heinrich, at his sister’s urging, reads the 1771 journal of Samuel Hearne.

The mode of this encounter—through text—is at the heart of Martha Baillie’s new novel, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel, which explores how our understanding of a place is written and bound—inescapably, often cruelly—by our own histories. Baillie, author of the Giller Prize–nominated The Incident Report, a novel told in 144 “reports,” has here created a beautiful and highly original work, layering postmodern nuance over a deep bedrock of myth and colonial history.

Inge Schlögel’s interest in the Arctic is at first purely linguistic, but another book she discovers will trigger depression and a suicide attempt: the diary of Abraham...