C.J. Cooke (2023) A Haunting in the Arctic.

C.J.Cooke is a Creative Writing tutor at the University of Glasgow. We’re back to that debate about whether you can teach creative writing? No matter. I read the debut novel of a Creative Writing tutor from the same university a few years back. It was, as you’d expect, proficient but dead on the page. I doubted if she didn’t have a doctorate and credit in the bank of an esteemed University behind her, she wouldn’t have been picked out of the slush pile and published.  Then again, Professor Louise Welsh teaches there too. Her debut novel was so good she didn’t need any introduction or creative writing badges.

C.J. Cooke has written a stack of books. Having had a quick swatch, I’m guessing witches and women is a constant theme. The powerlessness and fear of women. Yet their great power. ‘Memory and trauma pervades all my work’.  A Haunting in the Arctic has both.

Timelines. 1973. Barrents Sea. 100 nautical miles north of Murmask, Russia.

Coastguards pick a body out of the water. Dental records confirm it was Dr Diego Almeyda (28) from Argentina. He was doing research on a reconditioned former whaling ship, the Ormen.

Like the Marie Celeste, the Ormen was found floating with no crew on-board.

Timelines. May 1901, Dundee, Scotland. ‘Nicky’.

Nicky is newly married. Her husband has enlisted. He is away to fight the Boers. She has moved back in with her parents. Her father is a shipping magnate. Unknown to her, he’s in trouble. The market has changed. Society has changed. People no longer need whale oil to light their houses. Whale bone for corsets and garments is done. Two of his ships have sunk. The Ormen is all he’s got. It’s a modern ship with sail and steam. But he’s been screwing his workforce for so long they’re refusing to sail. Disgrace and bankruptcy to follow.

Nicky finds herself on-board the Ormen as the ship sails towards the Arctic. Hunting whales. The ship is alive and steeped in a world in which she is unfamiliar.

Timelines, December 2023, Skurmaskot, Iceland, ‘Dominique’.

The Ormen is dead. Beached on a deserted island. The breakers are coming to drag it out to sea and let it sink. Dominique intends to be the last person aboard and to recount the ships loss to her followers on social media.

She’s frightened when she hears other voices. A rival gang. Two men and a woman. They’re much better equipped with supplies than Dominique. They claim they’ve come to document the ship’s passing in the same way. They’ve also got a bigger social network falling.

Dominique can’t run away. She agrees to work with them. But there’s something the others are hiding from her. She’s not sure if they’ve seen the ghost of a woman that was said to have haunted the ship and shore. A malign, Selkie-like spirit. Dominique can feel her brooding presence. They all can. Read on.  

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