The Secret Ministry of Frost

In his ‘Acknowledgements’ at the end of this strange fantasy Nick Lake disarmingly admits that it is ‘probably far too long’ and ‘definitely odd’. He is right on both counts. A feisty 12-year-old girl heroine, and one moreover who has special powers and is pursued by evil forces because she is a threat to them, a missing father, a quest to the high Arctic where there are militarized polar bears and where humans are accompanied on out-of-body journeys by their ‘animal spirits’ – all this will surely ring some bells of recognition. The similarities to Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights are too numerous to ignore, yet this is a very different kind of book. Pullman’s fantasy is bound by its internal logic. Lake’s lets imagination run wild.

The girl is called Light, and is supposedly the daughter of an Irish scientist, who works in the Arctic, and an Inuit woman. When her father disappears, and Light is attacked by strange forces in Ireland, she is aided by her father’s friend Butler to buy an ice-breaker and go north in search of him. Her father’s captor, and Light’s enemy, is a supernatural monster called Frost, the spirit of primeval cold. Frost’s mission from his Arctic stronghold is to wipe out all humanity. Frost stands for emotional as well as physical cold, and humanity is eroding both. Only Light (for reasons that emerge) can destroy him.

The novel enacts their contest of powers in the high Arctic, and it makes a rattling yarn, certainly gripping if largely out of control. The most curious of its many oddities is that this is supposed to be humanity’s battle, but there are scarcely any humans in it. The only truly human character who really matters in the book is Arnie, a 12-year-old Inuit boy, first seen sporting a Manchester United sweatshirt. Almost everyone else, including Light, is at least in part a god, beast, monster, ghost or shaman, and hence an other-worldly force for good or ill. There is considerable graphic violence in this conflict, but this is contained by the book’s sheer narrative momentum. It is an overlong but entertaining curiosity.