Whit Fraser's novel Cold Edge of Heaven explores the human cost of Arctic land claims

The Next Chapter16:22Whit Fraser on Cold Edge of Heaven

Whit Fraser on his first novel, Cold Edge of Heaven.

Whit Fraser's debut novel covers a lot of ground, geographically and historically. 

Set in the Arctic, Cold Edge of Heaven begins with the arrival of three RCMP officers sent to establish an outpost in the High Arctic. Their mission is to assert Canada's sovereign claim to the land, a political priority in the mid 1920s. But as the cold, dark months of isolation unfold, only one of the three Mounties will survive. 

Fraser knows the Arctic well from his years as founding chair of the Canadian Polar Commission, former executive director of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and his tenure as a CBC journalist covering stories throughout the North. He wrote about those five decades in his memoir, True North Rising, which chronicles the political and social transformation that occurred in the region from the 1960s onwards. 

The author and career journalist is also the current viceregal consort of Canada. He lives in Ottawa with his wife, Governor General of Canada Mary May Simon. 

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He spoke to The Next Chapter's Shelagh Rogers about pouring fifty years of living and working in the Arctic into his first novel, Cold Edge of Heaven.

You write in the afterword that you visited an abandoned RCMP detachment on Devon Island. What did you see that inspired the events in the novel?

Actually, I had been to that place on Devon Island five times in my life, beginning first in the 1970s. The last trip, I had several hours to overlook the graves of the two Mounties who perished there in 1925 and 1926.

It was pretty firmly etched in my brain that this is a unique Canadian story that can't be told anywhere else but here.

When I got back to the ship that evening, I had the outline and the idea for that book in my head. It was pretty firmly etched in my brain that this is a unique Canadian story that can't be told anywhere else but here. 

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Can you set the political scene for us in the 1920s? Canada really wanted to assert its sovereignty in the Arctic. What was it the government expected these three RCMP officers to actually do?

Well, let's just go back one step. The government had to be sold on the idea of sovereignty. One of the people who drove that point home and campaigned harder than anyone else was the captain of the ship, Joseph Bernier. That's where the history comes in, and Bernier's contribution to Arctic exploration.

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It was Bernier that sold the government when he said, 'if we don't do something, we're going to lose the eastern Arctic the same as we lost Alaska to the Americans. So the plan was devised that all they could do was put human flagpoles on uninhabited high Arctic islands, to have a presence and record any movements that they may see. 

The three young Mounties are all veterans of the First World War. One of the officers suffers greatly from what was then called shell shock, which is now identified as PTSD. What did you learn about shell shock and its lingering effects as you wrote the novel?

I'm just old enough to have witnessed it as a kid in the town that I grew up in. I witnessed it in stories that I heard from others, including my grandmother, about an old great uncle who suffered terribly from shell shock. I felt that it probably needed to be mentioned because it was one of the things that dominated the society at the time. 

I tried to imagine Devon Island in the 1920s and what dealing with three people in the confines of a [small] shack would be like with no one else around.

I tried to imagine Devon Island in the 1920s and what dealing with three people in the confines of a [small] shack would be like with no one else around.

Once they were dropped, they had the constant fear: Does anyone know where we are? Did the ship that dropped us here make it all the way back? Did Captain Bernier get all the way back south? What if he had perished? Would anyone then ever find them or know where they are?'

That, I hope, is one of the underlying questions and mysteries in the book.

One of the most harrowing scenes in the book is an avalanche early on that buries one of the characters. You depict it very convincingly. What was it like for you to imagine this?

Sadly, that part came because of being a reporter. I had covered avalanches. I'd seen the tragedy and the devastation and the loss of life even.

It's that background that all of us reporters carry with us. We see things and they stick with us and maybe we get to tell the story another time in another way. And that's what I did with this.

In your years of traveling as a journalist and in your work for the Canadian Polar Commission and the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, what did the land come to mean to you?

That's a very hard question to answer because I think there are two groups of people that go North. People who are gripped by it as I am and always have been — it just gets inside you. 

It's the vastness, the beauty and maybe you're feeling yourself so insignificant in it all, such a tiny speck in all of that great grandeur and universe.

It's the vastness, the beauty and maybe you're feeling yourself so insignificant in it all, such a tiny speck in all of that great grandeur and universe.

And there are others who say it's the land that God abandoned or forgot. But I've always been gripped by it.

Comments have been edited for length and clarity.