Struggles come together

DETAILS

“Terra Nova,” by Henriette Lazaridis; Pegasus (304 pages, $25.95)

In early 20th century Britain, heroic women risked their lives to win voting rights and men defied death by launching expeditions to the Antarctic. On the surface, these historic struggles don’t appear to have much in common, yet Henriette Lazaridis seamlessly links them in “Terra Nova,” a literary novel that highlights their common denominator: how far men and women will go to achieve their goals.

Three characters connect these divergent plot lines: Viola Colfax, an ambitious photojournalist who wants to create photos that “astonish,” and two polar explorers: her husband, Edward Heywoud, and photographer James Watts.

Hunger is center stage. Imprisoned suffragettes starved themselves to bring attention to their cause, and on a months-long trek from England to the South Pole that Lazaridis dramatically chronicles, food runs low and drastic measures are taken to feed body and spirit.

The men’s struggle to reach the South Pole is filled with sensational descriptions of unimaginable cold. The novel takes its title from the name of British explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition. He lost a race to the pole to Norwegian Roald Amundsen and subsequently lost his life.

Yet it’s Viola’s artistry and hunger for greatness that feels like the novel’s bigger and more courageous struggle. Wanting to use her talents to promote the suffragette movement as well as her career, she photographs the emaciated hunger strikers in tableaux that emulate classical nude paintings including those by Botticelli, Titian and Manet. She stages an exhibit of her photos believing she has captured on film a political power in the women not seen in the iconic paintings, which tended to objectify and sexualize them.

Lazaridis chooses to blend the two plot lines and the characters collide in surprising ways after the men return to England.