Cherry

The story of Apsley Cherry-Garrard is a poignant one. Born an affable minor aristocrat in the English Home Counties, he escaped from the paralysing strictures of Edwardian life into the vast, awe-inspiring wastes of the Antarctic, where as a young man he discovered a clarity and a purpose that he never found again. His celebrated travel classic The Worst Journey in the World told the story of Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole. Cherry-Garrard had been one of the party, though not one of those selected for the final, tragic push. Despite the success of his written account, his failure to find and rescue Scott's frozen and demoralized team on its return journey had haunted him all his life, leading to paralysing bouts of depression. But there was more than that behind his ultimate nervous collapse. As Sara Wheeler - herself a polar explorer - puts it, 'in the Antarctic he had lived so close to what he called the bedrock of existence that the complicated, crowded and corrupted world he occupied at home seemed to him now to be worth nothing at all.' Cherry's slow decline from bright and fiery youth into confused and alienated old man is a process that many will recognise as a hazard of living too intensely, too young - as much a danger for prematurely retired sportsmen and rock stars as it is to explorers and war heroes, and a territory which David Hare memorably explored in his stage play Plenty. 'The world spun away from Cherry', says Wheeler, and in a sense this is the tragedy not only of one man but of all disappointment and the death of dreams. (Kirkus UK)