[In the following review, Drabelle offers favorable assessment of The Birthday Boys.]

Fifteen years ago an iconoclast struck what may be the most telling blow to an English reputation since Lytton Strachey took aim at his Eminent Victorians. The aggressor was journalist Roland Huntford. The target was Robert Falcon Scott, Scott of the Antarctic, the very incarnation of English heroism in a lost cause, whose last written words—scribbled feebly in 1912 as he and his two surviving comrades lay tentbound and starving after coming in second to the South Pole expedition led by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen—included this self-serving tribute: “I do not think human beings ever came through such a month as we have come through.”

In his book Scott and Amundsen, Huntford demonstrated that the inept Scott had only himself to blame. In contrast to Amundsen, who through years of study and preparation had made himself a professional Polesman, Scott had learned little from his own previous Antarctic experiences and nothing from anyone else's. The methodically prepared Amundsen met with comparably harsh conditions on his trek but actually gained weight while coping with them. Afterwards he could boast on behalf of his team, “We haven't got much to tell in the way of privation or great struggle. The whole thing went like a dream.” Scott's legend, Huntford argued, owed much to the British love of “heroic disaster,” especially when committed by dash-it-all amateurs.

The paradox is that, even after being thoroughly debunked, the Scott expedition still holds up as an engrossing story—at least as told by Englishwoman Beryl Bainbridge. Examining the historical record with a fiction-writer's eye (she is also the author of The Bottle Factory Outing, Young Adolf, An Awfully Big Adventure and other novels), she credits Scott with a virtue that Huntford overlooked: empathy for his men. “One could see in his eyes … that his heart was too big for his boots. God knows how, but he's managed to surmount his naval training and retain his essential humanity.” Bainbridge gives these lines to Titus Oates, whose grudging praise gains credibility from his being Scott's chief detractor among his four subordinates on the Polar trek.

Otherwise, her Scott looks very like Huntford's: whiny, “nervy,” bull-headed, short on self-confidence, intent on attributing his own errors to poor performance by colleagues or plain bad luck—altogether a captivating fool. Here he is, taking his turn as one of the novel's five first-person narrators, weaving a series of miscues into a farrago of destiny: “Everything fitted into place—the decline of the ponies, the death of Wearie Willie [the weakest of those ponies], the calamitous fall of the dogs into the crevasse. Let those who believe in random happenings, Caesar among them, carry on believing the fault lies in ourselves; nobody will ever convince me that the stars don't play a part in it.”

The counterpoint to this sense of impending doom is the fey optimism of “Birdie” Bowers, the expedition's navigator. One night (or was it day?—and who's to say which is which during the austral winter?) the moon comes out from behind clouds, lighting up “a gigantic crevasse lidded with a shiny covering of thin ice.”

“At the time,” Bowers recalls, “we were running downhill, the sledges at our heels and, but for that sudden pale illumination, we would most certainly have perished. I understood then that providence was on our side; it was unthinkable to believe God would save us simply to prolong the agony.” It turned out, though, that providence was indeed a sadist.

In case you're still scratching your head about those ponies, there was a precedent for importing them as Antarctic beasts of burden. Ernest Shackleton, Scott's chief British polar rival, had done so. But what Scott didn't bother to find out was how and why they had failed Shackleton. For Scott, they performed much as any schoolchild might predict, breaking through soft snow and sinking up to their rumps. Some died; the others had to be put down. Similarly, he brought motor cars south for transport without properly testing them; they seized up in the cold almost immediately. He and his men were reduced to serving as their own draft animals, hauling sledges loaded with food and fuel and gear. Amundsen and some of his men skied alongside while dogs pulled their sledges.

Bainbridge is known for mixing comedy and dread. We get a glimpse of Scott's wife, Kathleen, accidentally squirting him while eating grapefruit at a testimonial breakfast before departure. Then, as the expedition blunders toward catastrophe, the humor takes on a gallows tinge: One man's dream of a tap-dancer performing onstage gives way to the real-life sound of his tentmate's teeth chattering. There is nothing funny, however, about the novel's climactic scene: the crew's discovery, near the Pole, of a flag in their path—crushing proof that Amundsen has beaten them.

Frequently the narrators pause to evoke their sensations en route. Bowers again: “We ran into a series of blizzards of such icy ferocity that our minds threatened to become as numbed as our bodies. We were almost worse off in the tent than out of it, for our breath and the steam from the cooker deposited a rim of boar frost on the inner lining which, if we left the cooker burning long enough, gradually melted and dropped mercilessly down upon us. Our sleeping bags were daily turned into frozen boards, and in trying to prise them open one had to be careful lest the leather [break] like glass.”

The Birthday Boys (the title comes from the trekkers' placement of inordinate value on birthday celebrations so far from home) is something of a departure for the author, whose novels typically depict half-baked characters in prosaic settings—e.g., the young Hitler repeatedly spooking himself on his 1912 visit to his emigre-brother in Liverpool. Here, rather commonplace characters (perhaps too much so for their own good) flail about in a milieu whose peculiarity knows no bounds. Either way, the author provides her customary sculpted prose, throwaway dark jokes and keen-eyed scrutiny of human flaws. If not all of Beryl Bainbridge's previous novels have traveled well beyond England, perhaps the lasting appeal of the Scott saga will bring her the wide readership she deserves.