‘Beaches of Bones: Non-Human Hauntings as Legacies of Animal Cruelty in Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter’

Michelle Paver’s selection of Spitzbergen, ‘so far north that “dead things” last for years’, as the setting for her neo-thirties novel Dark Matter, demands of the novel’s readers an immediate engagement with the environmental and ecological. A key but hitherto unrecognised element of Michelle Paver’s gothicisation of this ‘virile male adventurer’ mode of literary engagement with the North, it’s landscapes, flora and fauna, are her depictions of animal cruelty, mutilation and death. In this article I argue that these moments and motifs, rather than being secondary to the human suffering, implied and actual, which is played out in the novel, in fact make explicit a subsumed history of violence towards the Greenlandic non-human which characterised colonial activity in this landscape for hundreds of years. Through an examination of Paver’s use of the motif of the seal, a literally littoral creature, and the proposition that what is haunting the Greenlandic coast in this text is specifically non-human, I offer a new critical approach to Dark Matter which makes clear how the coastal gothic at work here functions to illuminate (in this landscape of semi-perpetual darkness) how sadistic acts of animal cruelty constitute an abjection of the non-human in an attempt to ‘[consolidate] a stable sense of self’ as Nathaniel Leach puts it. In closing, I demonstrate how such an attempt is ultimately proven to be doomed by the ‘nagging inconsistency of the self thereby produced’, and the disavowed knowledge that our animal selves remain vulnerable to the ‘claimings and maimings’ we erroneously assure ourselves only non-humans are at risk of.