Far North shares the futuristic landscape of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and other literary post-apocalyptic novels. Far North is set in an Arctic tundra at an unspecified point in the future. An allusion to a lost "citizenry, determined to take itself to hell as soon as possible" sets the tone of vague dread, and it is within this context that we are gradually introduced to Makepeace, constable of the deserted town of Evengeline, who eventually hits the road in search of humanity.

The dystopian setting is just one of the ways in which the story is imbued with a familiar sense of the “future past”; this is an imagining of the future that leans towards an archaic stylization that recalls White Fang and other classics of frontier mythology. The narrative voice could come from the pages of a pioneer woman's diary, the terse language not so much delivered as embodied by the voice of Yelena Schmulenson. Hers is the voice of the women of the old West, flinty and tough, though softening at the recollected memories that haunt the narrative as it gradually gives up its secrets. This undercurrent of keening nostalgia and loss underlines the story's strongest theme, which is the loneliness of survival and¬ the painful recognition of human hubris. Early on, Makepeace, using old books to fuel a stove, observes that “a burned book always makes my heart sink a little”. The erasure of knowledge, as well as a reminder of a darker tradition of book burning as a sign of civilization eating itself, conflates Makepeace’s solitary existence with a lost past and a violent and frightening future.

The character of Makepeace is the most striking achievement of Far North, and, thanks to Schmulenson’s performance, this recording is one of those perfect marriages of voice and character. In the early chapters, Theroux very carefully presents Makepeace in un-gendered terms, her relationship with femininity comprising a novel twist to the genre, as well as serving as a climaxing plot point. Yet so self-contained is Schmulenson’s delivery, that the revelation is almost as much a surprise to the listener as to the reader. There is a rhythmical pattern to Schmulenson’s speech that gives a sense of perspective to her philosophising as well as to the hardships she stoically endures. Makepeace’s lonely journey to find life outside Evengeline is also a journey into her past, and a reaffirmation of her closely guarded values. “Somewhere along the ladder of years,” she muses, “I lost the bright eyed best of me”; Yelena Schmulenson takes us on Makepeace’s strangely affirming journey in a performance impossible to imagine being bettered. — Dafydd Phillips