The Spell of the Midnight Sun

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

In 1957, Maurice Cloughley was a 23-year-old New Zealander and itinerant
teacher working his way around the world. His taste for rural teaching
had been whetted at the age of 16 in an isolated posting in New
Zealand’s high country (before he was old enough to take his teacher
training). Canada’s North offered a similar challenge, and he soon
found himself teaching in such tiny northern settlements as Split Lake,
Grise Fiord, Fort Norman, and Arctic Bay. “[I] loved the North,”
Cloughley writes, “with a wild and absorbing passion”; yet he was
always conscious of being an outsider there. After a few years, a second
passion, sailing, drew him to England to learn the sport. It was in
sailing school that he met Katie, whom he would marry and bring back to
the Arctic.

Much of The Spell of the Midnight Sun is a warm and amusing memoir of
the Cloughleys’ life in the Cree and Inuit villages, where they were
intimately involved in local activities. But in addition to being an
entertaining writer, Cloughley is also a fine artist, and his stories
about Inuit children in a reading class, Dene drummers, a Dene village,
and children bent over a hole in the ice (“Where the Seal Got
Away”), among others, are charmingly illustrated with drawings of
maps, people, places, and activities. The book’s cover, a wrap-around
photo of Midnight Teabreak, a colored woodcut by the author, is
stunning.