SOURCE: “Sailing into Madness,” in Washington Post Book World, August 30, 1998, p. 3.

In the following mixed review, Yardley admires the insight and intelligence of The Voyage of the Narwhal, but derides the novel as “didactic.”

This sixth work of fiction [The Voyage of the Narwhal] by a recent winner of the National Book Award is an interesting but peculiar mixture of Darwin (The Voyage of the Beagle), Nordhoff and Hall (Mutiny on the Bounty) and Wouk (The Caine Mutiny). Set in the mid-19th century, it is the story of a failed Arctic expedition and the reverberations it sets off in the lives not merely of those aboard the ship, the Narwhal, but of other people as well. It is at once a rather conventional adventure story and a rumination on matters that are rarely encountered in such tales, i.e., science, solitude, community and fame.

The story, though...