The Navigator of New York, by Wayne Johnston

Iain Pears hails a gripping Arctic tale of bold exploration - and cold exploitation

At their very best, Canadian novelists are capable of books which few other English-language authors can manage. Writers like Robertson Davies managed to pull off the remarkable feat of steering past the worst habits of their English and US counterparts, avoiding the tendency towards domestic introspection and skipping the grandiloquent striving for mythic grandeur. Davies, in particular, invested the parochial with the universal, and approached the profound with high good humour. In The Navigator of New York, Wayne Johnston pulls off the same trick in a remarkably good book.

This is a historical novel, woven round the race for the North Pole at the turn of the 20th century by Robert Peary, who was ultimately credited with success (although this has been queried in recent years), and by Frederick Cook, who claimed precedence but was discredited and ended up in jail for fraud.

As with many historical novels, how much is fiction and how much fact will be uncertain to all except experts, but this doesn't matter. Johnston marries the epic of polar exploration with the individual quest of the narrator, Devlin Stead, for the truth about his identity, and so turns what could have become a fairly straightforward account of daring, heroism and back-biting into something far more intricate and touching.

Stead is born in Newfoundland; soon after his birth his father leaves to join an expedition, and his mother dies falling off a cliff. Question marks hang over her death, unresolved until the end, and the inner quest of the book revolves around the boy's need to understand what happened. Eventually he is contacted by an old associate of his father's, Frederick Cook, who claims to be his real father, and leaves his stultifying home town for New York, where he enters high society and prepares to become an explorer himself.

He accompanies Cook on the voyage, which leads to the latter's claim to have beaten Peary to the North Pole in 1908. Throughout the book there are flashbacks – often through letters – both to the night of his mother's death, and the night when his supposed father, Francis Stead, dies on an ice floe in one of Peary's expeditions. There is a mystery, but the novel is never a "mystery novel" in the sense that Devlin turns detective; rather, he is a passive figure, an observer, who waits patiently until the information he needs comes to him from the detailed explanations of Cook.

Johnston takes a risk here; it would have been an easier (and more conventional) option to have cast Devlin as an active figure, putting the pieces together. Instead, he opts for a novel of confession, with Cook drawn to reveal more as he adopts ever more dubious techniques to win his battle against Peary.

The paradox is that Cook is driven to a form of moral suicide in order to protect Devlin, and make up for the foolish mistake of his youth; only when this happens – when Devlin loses the last of his family – is he free to live himself. His mere existence tears down the forbidding Dr Cook in the same way that everyday life is perpetually tearing down New York, in which much of the drama takes place, then rebuilding something new.

Between Cook and Devlin there is a Freudian undercurrent of struggle, which results in the older man destroying himself by repeating earlier betrayals on an ever-greater scale. Once more, Johnston takes the less-than-obvious path; it would have been simple, and perfectly satisfying, to have the reader lose faith in Cook when his duplicity is revealed, Instead Cook is presented in a curious fashion – always engimatic, never wholly sympathetic when apparently virtuous, so there is no corresponding disillusionment when his flaws become manifest.

The one possible weakness in the structure is that Peary, the éminence grise, is only ever really seen through Cook's account; we have to take it on trust that he is an egomaniac, and that means the battle between the two older men never quite takes on the titanic overtones that would have made the conflict more balanced.

That's a small criticism, though, of a book as ambitious as it is intelligent, as carefully structured as it is finely characterised. While it lacks the delightful humour that percolated through Johnston's last novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, it makes up for it by a much more disciplined style which – particularly in the Arctic scenes – often encases tremendous descriptive passages which never tip into unnecessary wordage. Each paragraph is there for a good reason, not to awe the reader. The Navigator of New York reinforces Johnston's right to be considered one of the major figures in Canadian fiction.

Iain Pears's latest novel is 'The Dream of Scipio'