[In the following review, Melmoth calls Dickey's To the White Sea "a bitterly cold novel" that "is not for those of a nervous disposition."]

To the White Sea is a bitterly cold novel that seals the outback gothic of Deliverance in a crust of permafrost. As in the earlier book, James Dickey's milieu is wilderness, his concern less with the struggle against the elements, more with the way men's relations with other men can deteriorate in extreme situations. At the same time as admiring the human capacity for survival, it takes a dim view of human nature.

As if to pre-empt its being read as another allegory about the nasty, brutish and short thing we call life, the novel's opening is clearly located in space and time: Tinian Island, March 8, 1945. Muldrow, a tail gunner in the US Air Force, preparing for a bombing raid over Tokyo, is preoccupied with his kit. It soon becomes plain that this is not going to be a standard-issue war story. Muldrow is a man alone, short on conventional emotional responses. His mother died when he was a child, his father the year before he joined up. He was raised in Alaska, on the north face of the Brooks Range, "which is away from everything". He never went to school—his father taught him to read and write, and also how to hunt. This is someone on whom civilization has made little impact: "Out on the Range … I had got where I was scared of the human voice."

Muldrow's plane is shot down, the rest of the crew killed, and he parachutes into the burning dock area, where the only place he can find to hide is in one of Tokyo's sewage outlets. The city itself scarcely exists for him, reduced as it is to the accumulated filth that flows around him. His strategy is to head north and attempt to cross to the island of Hokkaido, where the snow and ice will be familiar territory.

To the White Sea tracks Muldrow on his journey and watches impassively while he kills without compunction for the things he needs—clothes, food, shoes. The longer his flight continues, the more complex his sense of self becomes. On the one hand, nothing is allowed to stand in the way of his continued existence; yet that personal essence which he will do anything to preserve is dwindling. He becomes taken up with camouflage, with blending in, becoming nothing. At one point, he dreams of walking in the snow—"my marks were like a ghost had made them". Success, in his eyes, is to move in silence and to leave behind not a suspicion of his passing.

Muldrow may represent some kind of bleak prelapsarian innocence, but he is far from comfortable. He is obsessed with death and killing, ponders endlessly the way the light catches the edge of his knife, alternating between a kind of dull placidity and alarming surges of adrenalin. He comes to realize that "the most satisfying thing that ever happened" to him was killing a Japanese soldier by jumping on him from the roof of a truck. If he calmed down a bit, he might pass as a psychopath. He eventually makes it to the frozen spaces he has been imagining and, when not living with the forest people or tending to an old falconer, composes eulogies to life in the freezer, where the cold "threads down through your nose like steel that gives you life". Nevertheless, his "heart of ice" proves to be another heart of darkness. Things take an apocalyptic turn and end in a welter of blood and feathers.

The language of To the White Sea is poetic and highly charged. Dickey takes language as far as it will go and sometimes overdoes it, even attempting to find words for things for which, Muldrow insists, no words exist. Some of the writing has an eerie brilliance; in one remarkable scene, Muldrow slaughters and plucks a flock of terrified swans in the moonlight, then gorges on raw flesh. "I was left with the long neck in my hands and the wings down limp: all that power, and the thing so light."

Like Deliverance, To the White Sea is not for those of a nervous disposition. Muldrow is so alarming because his instincts are so diametrically opposed to anything we think of as normal; he moves away from society, warmth and domesticity, and towards solitude, cold and having to kill for a living. Ultimately the reader's response to the book is likely to be determined by whether one believes that there is something of Muldrow in all of us, or that he is an isolated phenomenon, profoundly alienated, a freak.