Royal Navy Captain Robert Falcon Scott was the perfect hero for his time and place: Britain at the dawn of the 20th century. The explorer exemplified a particular kind of English heroism that combined physical courage, emotional restraint, a sense of fair play, and courtesy. Scott’s race to reach the South Pole was the quintessential Odyssean saga, complete with an exotic setting, nature at its most intense and unpredictable, and a worthy rival – the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. The goal of his quest? Glory.

Unlike Odysseus, however, Scott’s epic tale took place in real life, which has a habit of being messier than fiction. Iain Lawrence, a B.C. writer known for his fresh re-jigging of the genre that used to be known as boys’ adventure stories, takes an interesting approach to relating Scott’s story, telling it from the point of view of a pony.

Scott arrived in Antarctica with dogs, mechanical sledges, and 19 light-coloured ponies. Lawrence chooses James Pigg, the last of these ponies to survive, as his storyteller. It is an unlikely yet canny choice. The pony is a naive, childlike narrator, a conceit that allows Lawrence to explain things about the expedition as James Pigg figures them out. “They liked to open the box and consult with a glass stick that lived inside it. It was as thin as a worm, that little stick, with a red blood vein running down its middle. But it was a clever little thing. It never spoke, yet somehow told the men just how cold it really was.”

Lacking irony and self-consciousness, James Pigg is an open-hearted narrator who packs an emotional punch, telling us of his longing for home, his confusion, his fears, his determination, his admiration for Scott, and his love for his handler, Patrick Keohane, an Irish petty officer. His perception of the natural world is that of a poet: “A glacier moved so slowly that I imagined it saw everything else go by in a blur, the sun and moon chasing round and round the world like an eagle chasing a sparrow.”

An animal can’t know all the reader needs to, and Lawrence deals with these plot holes by giving James Pigg an astute sensitivity to human thoughts and by alternating chapters in James Pigg’s voice with shorter journalistic updates on the race itself, including details about the date, weather conditions, and Amundsen’s progress. These chapters also include quotations from Scott’s famous expedition diaries.

Lawrence is adept at plot orchestration and his material is rich. Attacks by killer whales, falls into crevasses, ice breaks, disorientation, blizzards, the antipathy between ponies and dogs, the failure of sledges, and unending darkness – all feature as setbacks on “the big push.”

There are cracks in the heroic narrative, however, and at a certain point the reader senses authorial uneasiness, as though the writer’s material is fighting him. Lawrence is too conscientious to fudge the facts of the expedition. Scott made some serious errors, and one of them was relying on the ponies. He was fleeced when he bought them, and they were not suited to the task they were given (even with their custom-designed snow shoes, one of the many intriguing details woven into the story).

As pony after pony dies or has to be killed, the mounting sadness of the story threatens to overwhelm it. The low point, from which the story does not recover, is when James Pigg collapses from cold, hunger, and fatigue, and Scott orders Keohane to beat the pony until he resumes his laboured journey. Human survival trumps animal survival but, in the context of Lawrence’s story, our loyalties are firmly with James Pigg, and we cannot forgive Scott.

There is a clash here between history, which demands accuracy, and fiction, which demands that the heroic journey be larger than itself. We know the history: Scott reached the South Pole a month after Amundsen and, on the return journey, he and all his men perished. Still, they were lauded as heroes. In Lawrence’s fiction, we want to be moved by the determination and courage of Scott and his men, by the glory of it all, but Lawrence is too good at making James Pigg a sympathetic character, turning our attention from the quest of a man to the plight of an animal. We are left wondering about all those resources, all that effort, all those deaths. We are left wondering: what was the point?