SOURCE: “A Writer's Dreams of Darkest Antarctica,” in Wall Street Journal, July 13, 1994, p. A12.

In the following review, Gamerman offers praise for The Birthday Boys.

The Antarctica of Beryl Bainbridge's novel The Birthday Boys is a land of “ice not really blue at all but shot through with spangled points of rosy light,” a land of cold so intense it can shatter a man's teeth into crumbs.

In fact, Ms. Bainbridge's novel about Robert Falcon Scott's doomed 1910 expedition to the South Pole is so convincingly icy, you might think she packed her parka and went there herself. But she confined her polar explorations to London.

“I did think of spending one night in Regent's Park, but I never got around to it,” the 59-year-old British novelist confides in her low, scratchy voice on a recent visit here. “I don't like the cold.”

So she just imagined it. The...