Land of the Snow Men. By George Belden. New York: Calamari Press, 2005. $10. (pa.) 0-9770723-1-2.

Manuscript recovered and edited by Norman Lock. Belden's drawings restored by Derek White.

Ostensibly, Land of the Snow Men is taken from the diaries of George Belden recounting his travels in Antarctica with the explorer Robert Scott during his tragic polar expedition. The book begins like a diary, though a very colorful one, with the explorers suffering ominously on the ice, approaching their end while Scott sulks in his tent like Achilles. As it progresses, the language slips into imagistic and surreal passages one would not expect to find in an expedition diary. As the editor Norman Lock says in the forward, "Little is known about George Belden. One thing is certain, however; he was not in Antarctica at the time of Scott's 1910-1912 expedition to the pole, but the year after the disaster."

Lock recounts discovering the manuscript in the basement of a sanitarium "in Vermont's Green Mountains" in which Lock was staying. "The strain of living in a country as alien as Africa," Lock says in the forward, "with little money and little hope of finding a publisher (for a novel he was writing), caused me to have a nervous breakdown." A staff member asked Lock to sort through some old boxes in the basement, and there he discovered the manuscript written by another patient nearly a century earlier.

George Belden, an architect, had been commissioned to create a monument to Scott in Antarctica. An evaluation given by a doctor at the asylum in which Belden's manuscript was discovered said of him: "The tragedy he was meant to memorialize proved too great for an impressionable mind, which gave way under the weight of obligation and sympathy."

And so on one level, this book is presented and can be read as a somewhat skewed historical text, recounting not exactly a history of events, but a history of George Belden's obsession with an event – Scott's final expedition.

But this is a book that begs to be examined on many levels. The first level Lock gives us freely – the consideration of the validity of the manuscript. Lock tells us that Belden was never with Scott, and also that the manuscript was discovered in an asylum in which Lock was, himself, staying. Lock describes Belden's "fantastic depiction" of the death of Scott as being "an attempt by Belden to forge a modern myth of the hero."

Lock also includes sample manuscript pages and yet much of the text in these sample pages doesn't appear in Lock's edited manuscript, most noticeably a line Lock references several times "Hell is consciousness," which Belden supposedly copied repeatedly throughout his notes and diary, and yet which never appears in Lock's edited version of the manuscript. This opens the text up to certain other considerations of validity: what texts were chosen for inclusion by Lock and why? And what texts were omitted?

Lock tells us again and again in the introduction how to read this text. In Kinbote fashion, he opens by telling us that Belden disliked Scott and was driven to eulogize him in the incredibly poignant final scene by guilt. Lock also gives us literary models for the manuscript, ranging from Dadaism and Surrealism. But Belden himself references only Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Verne's The Center of the Earth. Is Lock trying to add validity to Belden's manuscript or is he subverting it?
Unlike everyday fiction, in which the thin skin of supposition hides the meat of the story; this book is more of an onion – beneath each layer is another and another, and each layer that is revealed reshapes the way the book can be considered.