Antarctica

Was it Hugh Grant? (That may sound flippant but when he was just starting out getting roles in the 80s, he played Cherry-Garrard in the miniseries adaptation of The Last Place on Earth.)

Somebody named Simon Vance, a name I do not recognize offhand.

Ah, Vance! I've had the pleasure to meet him briefly after a talk he gave (with Guy Gavriel Kay, an author favorite of mine). I don't follow his recorded books work much but he has a massive, massive rep in the field, and he's a pleasant fellow. I'll have to pass that on to the folks I know who introduced me to his work.

the book is widely considered the best ever written about an antarctic expedition by one of the participants

ha ned that's wild. he is very very good. i expect most of the british accents of the original party were not too extremely far apart, but it is pretty clear when he is narrating say, scott's journal, rather than one of the seamen's, or even bowers's.

i've looked v briefly at readers commentaries. a couple of them complained of cherry-gerard's inclusion/melding of various participants' journals. i cannot disagree more, they are grafted in beautifully, are clearly distinguished, and add fantastic details. and this tale is one of almost innumerable details-- ones that blow my goddamn mind. amongst the many stories detailing the torturous lives of the ponies there is one in which one weakening pony has his hind quarters fall through the ice adjacent to a pod of taunting orcas the entire dilemma is just riveting.

Simon Vance does audiobook work regularly, I think. He read the Stieg Larsson trilogy.

He's done a lot of good books (which obviously excludes Larsson), and reads them really well.

the brr.fyi guy made it back home

"the many stories detailing the torturous lives of the ponies"

you get more of a sense of the character of Weary Willie than the humans at times, he's the only one sensibly saying fuck this nonsense, albeit through passive resistance. The passages from other fellow expeditionists journals definitely enhance the story. I can't remember whose journal it was, but there was a bit that made me chuckle that was butthurt at the positive advance of Amundsen's expedition party, and commenting that they have brought a good supply of potatoes with them he noted: "there must be a renegade Irishman amongst them".

ac-g’s slow boil fury at bureaucracy in his egg delivery to british museum or whatever showed v some amusing restraint, eh.

at least back the 1910's the explorer classes viewed orcas as the deadly predators they are, none of this anthropomorphic hippy shit about swimming with them, they knew that at times it only took one fateful misstep onto some fragile sea ice and they were lunch.

Vance’s recitation of this parody poem really is a delight:

THE PROTOPLASMIC CYCLE
Big floes have little floes all around about ’em, And all the yellow diatoms couldn’t do without ’em.
Forty million shrimplets feed upon the latter, And they make the penguin and the seals and whales
Much fatter.
Along comes the Orca and kills these down below, While up above the Afterguard attack them on the floe:
And if a sailor tumbles in and stoves the mushy pack in, He’s crumpled up between the floes, and so they get their whack in.
Then there’s no doubt he soon becomes a patent fertilizer, invigorating diatoms, although they’re none the wiser,
So the protoplasm passes on its never-ceasing round, Like a huge recurring decimal … to which no end is found.

From “The Antarctic Exploration Anthology: The Personal Accounts of the Great Antarctic Explorers (Bybliotech Discovery Book 1)” by Ernest Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, Douglas Mawson, Apsley Cherry-Garrard)