Review: All the White Spaces

By Ryan Fleming.

Cover courtesy Amazon.

“Is Alternate History a genre or a setting” is an oft-debated topic in the genre (or the setting). A lot of the time it really depends on the specific work. Some of them use an alternate history as a unique setting for the familiar trappings of a detective story. Others want to focus on the changes to our own history specifically and so present a slice of life in the alternate world. Is it possible, however, for a work to be alternate history when that aspect hardly meets the definition of genre and plays little part in the setting?

Such is a question asked of Ally Wilkes’s 2022 novel All the White Spaces. The novel concerns a trans man enlisted in a British polar expedition that meets with difficulties. Nothing really different to our own history, but Wilkes imagines this particular expedition as taking place in 1920, where the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration continued after the First World War. The main genre as far as plot is concerned is not alternate history, however. The difficulties that beset the expedition are supernatural in nature. This is a horror tale.

A rare mash up of genres, combining alternate history and horror, but one that is of great interest to fans of both. How does All the White Spaces fare as a horror novel? As alternate history? How does it balance the two? Beyond genre considerations, how is it as a work of fiction detached of those concerns? Even stripped of the trappings of its atypical genre mashup, All the White Spaces stands as an engaging novel by virtue of its characters alone.

That the protagonist of the novel is a trans man in 1920 adds an extra layer of interest on top of what has already been piqued by the plot, setting, and genre combination. We experience all the events of the novel from the perspective of Jonathan Morgan and spending all that time with the character we learn much about our protagonist.

Jonathan stows away aboard the Fortitude in Argentina bound for Antarctica. It had been the dream of his two brothers, dead in the trenches of the Great War, to enlist with veteran polar explorer James Randall on his next expedition. That Jonathan could not serve as his brothers did, owing to the gender he was assigned at birth, brings him great survivors’ guilt that carries throughout the novel. All members of the expedition carry this one way or another, almost all of them being actual veterans of the War. The heroism of the prewar polar expeditions has given way to a far more sombre endeavour in 1920. This combination gives Jonathan a certain naivety amongst his expedition mates, as he tries to prove himself to a crew that has largely given up on the point of anything.

It’s here where the character’s gender identity, as a trans man rather than the more familiar adventure trope of a girl or woman simply disguised as male out of convenience, really marks out Jonathan’s actions in a different light. He struggles to live up to the masculine ideals he has heard from tales of the polar expeditions and the Great Wars, including his brothers’ sacrifices, whilst most of the other crew have grown wary of them. Jonathan is very much of product of the Edwardian environment he was raised in, to the point where his reaction to finding two of his crewmates engaging in a carnal act is exactly as you might expect for a naïve young man brought up in that era. It brought the character a warts-and-all realism to this reader.

The leader of the expedition, so synonymous with Antarctic exploration in the novel’s world that he has actually acquired the nickname “Australis”, is one James Randall. He looms large over his crew by reputation and later by personality and the occasional threat. In the early parts of the novel, aboard the ship, he hardly appears. He spends the time aboard the Fortitude secluded in his cabin, only really entering the narrative properly once they make landfall in Antarctica. This serves to build him up in reputation to the reader as Jonathan’s lofty expeditions of this hero are countered by those returning hands. In this sense Randall almost functions as an inverted Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, accompanying the characters on the boat all the way to their destination. More than Kurtz, though, Randall functions as an Ahab figure, his service revolver bringing a quick end to any proposed mutiny, one way or another, once it hits the fan. And hit the fan it does!

We also find out, that beyond determination to restore some of his own glory, that Randall has also brought his illegitimate son, Tarlington, aboard as science officer. Tarlington is a well-drawn character whose parentage is subject to a revelation later in the book, but it was perhaps one revelation too much. Especially when his somewhat outcast nature amongst the crew had seemingly already been revealed in a far more interesting way, without resorting to making his entire abrasive personality the mere result of daddy issues. Despite the father-son reveal being too much, both characters had a lot of personality.

So too did many other members of the crew. Foremost amongst them is Harry Cooper, the expedition’s “dogsbody”, childhood friend of the Morgan brothers, though from a lower social status, and the one who smuggled Jonathan aboard. Cooper comes off as a very weak-willed character, his own survivors’ guilt over the deaths of Jonathan’s brothers leading him to try and be protective of him, only to find Jonathan possessing a far greater will. Cooper comes across throughout as wishing he would be anywhere rather than the expedition, roped into it purely due to his sense of protectiveness, perhaps even more, towards Jonathan. However, knowing what he has been through, and will go through, it’s difficult not to wish he had just gone anywhere else than back to the Morgan estate when he came out of the trenches.

Smaller characters are still given distinct personalities. Expedition second-in-command Boyd starts out as Randall’s most trusted lieutenant and progressively becomes more and more disillusioned to the point where mutiny is a real possibility. Navigator Nicholls stands out as a tragic figure, perhaps one of the few to still believe in the point of their mission without the delusions of Randall, getting caught up in the personal dramas and biases of the others. Even cook Macready, memorable beyond his high calibre Antarctic terror surname for being too broadly drawn to not be loveable and the only member of the crew to take anything of a shine to Jonathan.

That many of the characters, whether we like them or not, stand out to the reader really hammers home the horrors when they do finally arrive. That these are characters we’ve come to know and care about really makes what happens to them in the glow of the aurora more effective than had we not already spent time with them.

All the White Spaces is a horror novel far more than it is an alternate history novel, and it’s as a horror novel we should perhaps most judge it as for quality.

Polar horror is nothing new of course, first coming to prominence in the 1930s with the likes of H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? and continues with modern examples such as Dan Simmons’s The Terror. Despite the common settings, there is in fact a lot of variation in the types of horrors encountered at either pole. Even the feelings that those horrors evoke are different.

All the White Spaces is a novel largely about despair. If that was not already evident enough from the locale, era, and descriptions of the characters, remember that misfortune hits the expedition long before the supernatural does. The sinking of the Fortitude leads to a desperate dash by lifeboat to any land, and the possibility is even raised that the survivors might even just freeze to death in the boats without ever making it to the ice. When they do land, they are miles from their intended landing point and low on supplies, leading to another desperate dash to a German encampment that is the closest place they might find supplies.

It is here that the first major split and potential rebellion happens amongst the crew, between those who think their best chances are on land or at sea. The notion that the Fortitude was sabotaged is raised, and the distrust of Germans amongst a mostly British crew, after four years of warfare in which most of them fought, begins to raise its head. These fears are quickly abated, only to be replaced by something far more sinister when they finally reach the German encampment and find it completely abandoned, with sled dogs on the edge of death from starvation in their cages. The prospect that the Germans are still out there never goes away from the crew, which masks most of them from even considering other possibilities.

It is here that we should probably address one of the major drawbacks of the novel, that it is simply too long. We spend hundreds of pages before we even get to the German camp. That serves a purpose of introducing us to the characters and their relationships, which is mostly necessary. It also serves a purpose of allowing Wilkes to show off her incredible knowledge of polar exploration whilst aboard the Fortitude; perhaps less necessary but it does give a real impression to the tough living one would have to endure on such an expedition, of which most readers would have little conception. But taken together with the sinking, the escape from the ship, the lifeboat journey to the continent, the disputes, and the trek across the ice it all adds up to far too long to get to what the back cover promises.

A lot of this can be put down to first novel jitters. A tendency to overcook the dish, getting in everything you know and want, without realising that most of the time, less is more. It is especially apparent with how much development Wilkes gives her characters and her underlying knowledge of this era of polar exploration. At the same time, it is not an issue that only impacts the first parts of the novel, unfortunately, but carries through all the way to the end even after the supernatural aspects of it have kicked off in full. The precise nature of the supernatural horror and the mystery surrounding it only add to it.

This is a novel about despair, and the horrors reflect that. It is not a shapeshifting alien out impersonating your crewmates, nor the remnants of some ancient civilisation we cannot comprehend. At least, it’s not explicitly either of those things, nor anything else for that matter. The supernatural element of the story is an ethereal presence hiding from them in the aurora, that plays upon the loss and trauma they have suffered both before and during the expedition. We never find out exactly what is out there. It sometimes takes familiar forms to our characters, and sometimes has no form at all, as it lures the crewmembers out onto the ice, never to be seen again.

It is with these repeated instances that again the length of the novel becomes a factor. It takes far too many instances of crewmembers disappearing whilst on watch before the plot kicks up another gear. Part of that is due to Randall’s increasing instability and the belief that it’s Jerry out there on the ice picking them off one by one. Either of which I could accept as reasonable explanations, but we still have to endure too many repetitive instances before the action really rises. This could have easily been forgiven had the supernatural attacks been more in the line of individual set pieces with each instance, instead of characters waking up and finding the watch disappeared – to the point where we finally get to experience what has been happening to them firsthand it falls flat, because that many instances of mystery have simply built it up too much for something ethereal to make much of an impact. The drawn-out nature of the plot does not help the despairing horror but in fact underwhelms it.

Horror is not the only genre that All the White Spaces is purported to be, of course: it has been categorised as an alternate history. This is technically true, but there is no real point-of-divergence from our own history. Nor is there a sense that this takes place in a world different from our own. In the debate of whether an alternate history work uses the concept as a genre or a setting, All the White Spaces falls into the rare column of N/A. The question is then: why alternate history?

In fairness, as far as I have been able to ascertain, Wilkes has never herself called her work alternate history. She has described it in an interview as “a sort of imagined tail-end of the heroic age, seen through the prism of the First World War”. Indeed, others have categorised it as simply historical fiction. The novel cannot be imagined without the First World War, since it informs so many of the characters’ motivations and backgrounds. However, I could have easily accepted the novels supposition of a forgotten, disastrous Antarctic expedition in the years after the Great War when it would have been consigned to obscurity to this day. A secret, rather than alternate, history. Indeed, in the same interview Wilkes mentions the Shackleton-Rowett expedition of 1921-22 that saw the death of famed explorer Ernest Shackleton and has even been cited as the dénouement of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. The expedition in the novel would seem to be inspired by that, with Randall and Fortitude replacing Shackleton and the Quest.

Is the replacement of real historical figures with fictitious ones enough to categorise as alternate history? Could Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All the King’s Men be considered alternate history in that it covers the historical story of American politician Huey Long through the fictitious Willie Stark? Not really, to my mind. All the White Spaces is more than a fictional retelling of real events, however. It is indisputably a genre work owing to its horror elements. By that standard, is Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2010 novel Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter alternate history? Maybe? Definitely more so than All the King’s Men, but is that enough?

There’s something unique in the way All the White Spaces intertwines character, setting, and genre that could lead to it being described as alternate history. Debate around the veracity of that opens up many more questions and will probably boil down to the old genre vs. setting debate. It’s reminiscent in some ways of Nick Setchfield’s The War in the Dark (2018) which infuses a dark fantasy, almost horror element into the Cold War. It is not the totality of the Cold War, which still has all our familiar geopolitical flashpoints, so it is something distinct from Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series which imagines the Napoleonic Wars fought with dragons. Both All the White Spaces and War in the Dark could be described as alternate history, but only if you squint hard enough. Certainly, for the former, part of the categorisation as alternate history might be due to ignorance of the historical Antarctic expeditions. This reader went from considering it alternate history to not upon finding out that there were post-Great War Antarctic expeditions like Shackleton-Rowett. Wilkes’s “imagined tail-end” is in fact just an imagined part of a very real tail-end.

 Now the question is purely theoretical: would a work set in a historical period very similar to our own but with one particular aspect changed, without impacting the larger world, qualify as alternate history? Imagine, for instance, you wanted to tell a tale of Antarctic exploration in the vein of the Heroic Age but set against the backdrop of the Great Depression with people enlisting simply out of desperation at their economic destitution. The Heroic Age was long gone by October 1929 but still recent enough to be evocative to the characters, while the Great Depression was a very real period of economic bust. Does a fictitious attempt at replicating the former during the latter qualify it as alternate history? Again, perhaps the notion of a secret history should be considered. There was nothing stopping someone possessed of the means and a desire to outfit an Antarctic expedition during the 1930s. Indeed, that’s when several famous examples of Antarctic horror were written. These, however, were deep into the “Mechanical” age of exploration.

What I’m trying to express with this poor example that the notion of alternate history as a setting perhaps does not need to have any trappings of alternate history as a genre. You want to tell an Antarctic survival horror story but set it in a period when Antarctic exploration was really at a standstill. You want to tell a dark fantasy story in the world of international espionage but set against the backdrop of the historical Cold War. You want to tell a story of a later Apollo mission when much of the world had stopped caring. What is the amount history must be affected for it to count as alternate history? Would an extra couple Apollo missions listed as their own pages on Wikipedia rather than on the cancelled missions page be enough, even if the rest of history was to play out exactly the same and, more importantly from a storytelling perspective, be irrelevant to the work itself?

All the White Spaces probably cannot be said to be alternate history when held up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny. That it is categorised as such does however raise questions about the demarcation point between historical fiction, a secret history, and alternate history. And maybe, just maybe, it’s up to the individual reader.

Despite not being truly alternate history, and its horror elements being somewhat underwhelming, there are still reasons to recommend All the White Spaces. Wilkes is very good at writing characters and having them properly defined, even when they’re in a mass of chunky jumpers and oilskins. Her depth of knowledge in this era of Antarctic exploration also gives the novel a sense of realism that someone cribbing from the Wikipedia pages would not have been able to achieve.

Beyond genre considerations, there is the issue of novel length, which some might forgive for the positives mentioned above, or from a first-time novel writer, but others might not. For this reader, enough confidence remains to one day read her second tale of polar horror, the Arctic set Where the Dead Wait (2023). Her second novel turns the clock back half a century and the globe all the way around to be set in an Arctic expedition looking for the Northwest Passage.

The question of the benchmark by which works might be considered alternate history continues to dwell upon this reader, even from a book he does not consider alternate history. There is maybe something to be said about the encroachment of fantastical settings within our own history creeping closer and closer to the modern day. Instead of being set in some imaginary epoch, or hundreds of years in the distant past, are we becoming far enough removed from certain historical periods that the difference between an alternate history setting and a fantastical one are becoming blurred? If so, why not alternate history?

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Ryan Fleming is the author of SLP's Reid in Braid and various short stories for the anthologies, as well as editing The Scottish Anthology.