Aurora Borealis

Writing in the Arctic Circle

In the spirit of all this electromagnetic hullabaloo going on above our heads, I thought I’d share an extract from my third book Dark Skies: A Journey into the Wild Night (Bloomsbury, 2019), in which I visited the city of Tromsø in Arctic Norway to experience the polar night and the aurora borealis. Who knew I’d see the northern lights over my house in the south of England a few years later? We stood in the garden last night and watched them in complete awe. You know when the news promises something dramatic like a storm, and then it’s always a disappointment. This was the opposite, because I heard nothing about this until yesterday evening and then suddenly the aurora was over my bloody house!? Madness. Anyway, here’s a snap of me in Tromsø, and I’ve popped an extract below to give you a taste of what I experienced, plus the accompanying illustration I drew for the chapter. Let me know if you’ve seen the aurora this weekend!

Me with the aurora! Nineties album cover vibes, non?

Extract from Dark Skies: A Journey into the Wild Night (Bloomsbury, 2019):

‘My first night with the aurora had given me a taste for it, so I booked onto a group visit out to the edges of the city to go ‘aurora hunting’ - following waves of electromagnetic activity across Troms county in a little minibus. Our group leader and aurora expert Emiles was from Latvia. I asked him how he coped in Norway with three months of darkness; he said he spent a lot of time snowshoeing. 

Emiles had brought snowsuits for those who weren’t wearing enough layers, and after half the group pulled them on we piled into the minibus and drove out towards the mountains. The app I had downloaded on the flight from Gatwick informed me the conditions were good tonight. You can watch a minute-by-minute update of a map of northern Europe, with what looks like a cloud of nuclear waste moving slowly towards Norway indicating high electromagnetic activity. After twenty minutes or so we stopped by the side of the road. The eight of us had been chatting between ourselves the entire journey, and most of us were so jammed into the middle of the vehicle that peering through the windows would have been impossible. The doors rolled open and out we fell - underneath the most majestic sky I had ever seen. 

If the aurora at Prestvannet lake was a freshwater stream, this was volcanic - a frenzied, blistering river ripping the sky into pieces. With the lights of the city far behind us, the air was ablaze with colour. Blues and greens still shone from the bright core, but along the edges, the burnt pinks and oranges of grapefruit zest and coral, the violet of aubergines and mallow flowers. We stood high up on the edge of civilisation, before the mountains started to push up from the earth, and the sky was open to us all, a hotchpotch group of travellers from across the globe joined together in one moment to bathe in electromagnetic beauty.

My chapter illustration of the aurora, which was later used for the front cover of the book, complete with electric blue foiling

Emiles gathered up a pile of logs from the back of the bus and lit a fire on the icy road, and we watched the ice disintegrate beneath the flames. For the next hour we took it in turns to wander beneath the aurora, capturing long-exposure photos, observing the ripples and tides of light as it streamed over our heads like rainbows liberated from their geometric constraints. We drank hot chocolate to warm up, huddled by the fire when the cold penetrated too deep into our bones and sinews. Beneath my ski jacket and multiple layers I could feel the scratchy heat of my merino jumper against bare skin, and under that the hot trickle of chocolate as it fell down into my stomach. The French couple in our group had started dancing to electro swing to keep back the cold. I hopped around the fire with an Australian girl, who pointed out how all the stars looked different on this side of the world. 

Eventually the Lights started to fade and, secretly relieved, we climbed back into the bus and snuggled together for heat. Emiles drove us away from the city, chasing the electric glow that was now floating away behind the mountains in front of us. Onwards, winding between fjords and jagged rocks sealed over with snow and ice as we travelled on through the night until finally, around two in the morning, the minibus stopped and we climbed out. Here there were no houses, no strings of lights in coffee shop windows. Before us a midnight blue fjord reached out into nothingness, a shadowy mass of saltwater cloaked in stars. It was so dark here that we felt almost blind. Had we driven to the ends of the earth? Not quite, but we had reached the end of the island, marked by a quiet fishing town called Brensholmen just a few miles on. Emiles told us that fishing and agriculture had been at the heart of this place since the Iron Age, but still the population numbered no more than three hundred people. It was a vibrant little corner of Norway, though; in winter tourists came to see the aurora, and in summer a regular ferry crossed to the nearby island of Senja, from whose decks visitors could watch orca and humpback whales spyhopping in the Norwegian Sea.

This was our final stop before the long drive back to Tromsø. We stood in sleepy silence and watched the fjord. There, reflected in the water like a shimmering sapphire curtain, a faint cloud of aurora lingered in the sky as if to wave a final farewell. It would be the last fragment I saw before leaving the Arctic and heading back to Britain, and if I looked closely I could almost see a golden city hidden in the folds, just as Lyra had seen in the Retiring Room when I first read His Dark Materials all those years ago. Standing here beneath a Nordic winter sky, it was easy to see how the Lights had woven their way into so many folktales, myths and stories. They charged the imagination with a murmuring, bewitching electricity - intangible and unforgettable. We watched and waited until the last glimpse of light had faded from the air, the final stroke of a paintbrush, gone. The sky returned to darkness, scattered with white stars emitting their own plasmatic radiance, and cold and stiff with sleep, we climbed into the bus to find our slow way back to the midnight city of Norway.’

Hardback editions of Dark Skies: A Journey into the Wild Night (Bloomsbury, 2019)