[In the following review, Cross offers tempered assessment of The Birthday Boys.]

Well into the 1960s, my schoolmasters solemnly taught that Amundsen—he merited neither rank nor Christian name—beat Captain Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole only by the most dastardly trickery.

Luckily, no era set itself up for debunking quite as much as the final decades of the British Empire. By the 1970s, the line “I am just going outside and may be some time,” had launched a thousand comic sketches. In 1979, Roland Huntford's Scott and Amundsen (later republished as The Last Place On Earth) completed the job by portraying Scott as a self-deluding romantic whose incompetence cost lives.

Beryl Bainbridge leans heavily on Huntford and the more veiled criticism of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World for her fictional first-person portraits of the five men who died returning from the South Pole in the autumn of 1912. Scott's companions are the boozy and loyal Evans, saintly Wilson, cheerful Bowers—and Oates, stoic and aloof to the end. The theme of birthdays celebrated in extraordinary circumstances casts a suitably juvenile light on their characters.

However, Bainbridge keeps her novelist's licence oddly in check by shying away from issues that Polar historians still debate: the sudden choice to take five men to the Pole, for example, and the exact circumstances of the deaths of Evans and Oates. Probably only one episode, an instant of unrequited homosexual attraction, will raise real hackles among the old guard of the British Antarctic Survey. My great disappointment was that Bainbridge did not work harder at the character of Edward Wilson, doctor, ornithologist, artist and Christian, the “Uncle Bill” upon whose shoulder the other birthday boys lean.

Bainbridge is not the first person to borrow Scott's story. Whether to ridicule or imitate, we still enlist the spirit of Scott's men on our own winter journeys, 80 years after their blood congealed into black ice.