Books: A lost isle of the ice seas? That'll be Britain then

Joanna Kavenna tells us how, tired of London, the Tube, the grey crowds, she lost the will to push herself forward. We can all sympathise, can we not? But she decided to exchange this "endless sea of people" for a dark wasteland of the north.

Strange to relate, she was following in a grand tradition of poets, men of destiny and dreamers. Her objective was Thule, the Atlantis of the Arctic, the mysterious and unfortunately misplaced island of the ice seas. The Greek navigator Pytheas started it all, in the fourth century BC setting out north from the Mediterranean and finding Thule among seas which were six days beyond Britain. Here the land, although inhabited, was plunged into winter blackness, the ocean, skies and land congealed into a viscous mass, and Pytheas, wisely one feels, chose to circumvent this unpromising, seething, thickening ocean and set sail for home.

The isle of Thule has been downright elusive ever since. As the ancient geographers went about plotting the rim of the known world they pondered where it might be. Great thinkers added their tuppence- worth. For Virgil, it was Ultima Thule, signifying remoteness and the very limit of the known. Strabo proclaimed Pytheas a fraud - plainly, Britain was the furthest inhabited land because there people lived in cold and misery. As the maps were filled in, Thule moved about. It was the Shetlands, it was Iceland, it was Norway. Or perhaps it was still out there, an elusive cold rock lost in the mists.

Thule was helpful however; for poets the word evoked notions of isolation, the beauty and majesty of a Land Beyond. It was all the better for being unfound. Yet, as Kavenna reminds us, it also sprung up from time to time in the accounts of otherwise fairly level- headed explorers. As they contemplated the bleak ice-bound lands ahead, staring out into the screaming wind, they recalled the name Thule, and found themselves "pinning the word to the empty wilderness". When the great Fridtjof Nansen wrote up his most famous Arctic adventure he too conjured the word from the cold ether, using it to evoke the terrible beauty of the north: we were to understand that he was a Norseman venturing beyond Thule, and so to the Pole - there he'd jab his flag into the ice, and so slay, in a sense, the dragon.

Kavenna's first port of call was Shetland, where happily she finds a bar called Thule (a promising start, you might think, but it looks like a prison and the sturdy drinkers whom she quizzes are baffled) and one upsets his glass when she tries to pontificate upon the Roman historian Tacitus and his theories about the subject. Undaunted, she travels to Iceland, then Norway, Estonia, Greenland and Svalbard. There are more encounters: with the dull-witted; with philosophers half-crazed, one suspects, by the Northern Lights; and with the downright scary (the Thule Society, of which Hitler was a member, sought to trace out there the pure blood of the Aryan race).

Onward Kavenna ventures, wending her way in pursuit of the impossible - this dream of a virginal land "that could never breathe or sweat as a crowded hopeless city or a history-strewn landscape could". She brings along a plethora of other travellers, or rather their little musings on Thule - one of them the Arabist and explorer Richard Francis Burton, who, like her, carried "the idea of Thule like hand-luggage".

I must reveal here that the author does not find Thule. Or at least, not a waved-lashed, ice-capped rock of the north. Thule was, in many seafaring tales, positioned not in the Arctic seas but between the earth and the world of the gods - that is, somewhere beyond the reach of mortals. And so it has proved to all seekers; the island remains out there somewhere but only as an unobtainable state. It's desirable but impossible. It taunts us. We are drawn to this place on the edge of our imagination, yet Thule has never promised to be paradise. The lonely isle expresses for us the ambivalence we feel, but can seldom grasp, in nature - the grandeur but also our unease in the face of the raw elements.

This is Thule's artful story, and Kavenna delivers it with easy erudition. The Ice Museum is neither travelogue nor essay but the expression of a heartfelt passion for dark myth and the far reaches of our imagination. Hers is a wonder voyage which never seems to tire; it has a ceaseless, enchanting energy that washes over the reader as if from those restless seas. She is poetic, bold and brave in language - it's an astoundingly self-assured debut. A sensitively poised, cherishable book.

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