SOURCE: “Polar Adventure,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 7, 1994, pp. 10, 15.

In the following review, Freeman offers favorable assessment of The Birthday Boys.

The Birthday Boys, a new novel by the English author Beryl Bainbridge, is an imagined account of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to the South Pole in 1912, told in the voices of Scott and four men who followed him to their deaths. In each account a birthday is celebrated, or mentioned—thus the title. It's an ironic touch by a novelist noted for her droll humor. A darker, more tragic story couldn't be masquerading under a more jovial veneer.

I read The Birthday Boys in one sitting, in a state of complete absorption, stunned by its beauty, by the depth of its accomplishment, but perhaps most of all by the audacious choice of historical subject matter which Bainbridge has appropriated and so flawlessly rendered into...