SOURCE: “Victorian Voyages and Other Mind Trips,” in Hudson Review, Vol. 52, No. 1, Spring, 1999, pp. 167–72.

In the following excerpt, Balée offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of The Voyage of the Narwhal.

A fascination with all things Victorian continues in fiction as well as in film. Clearly, some aspect of nineteenth-century culture is intersecting with our twentieth-century Weltanschauung and we are drawn back to this particular past. I think one of the main points of connection concerns an obsessive quest for knowledge, no matter how dangerous. The intellectual imperialism that dominated Europe and America through much of the nineteenth-century has risen with new intensity in the age of the Internet. Now, as then, it's a tangled web we weave.

Certainly, the thirst for knowledge and the control of that knowledge is the theme that animates my favorite novel of the last year, Andrea Barrett's The Voyage of the...