The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Joe awakens in the Hangar. The pilot, Shannenhouse, wasn’t in the barracks; he and Joe are the only survivors. Shannenhouse informs Joe that the heater malfunctioned and flooded the room with carbon monoxide. Shannenhouse is a WW1 veteran. He enlisted after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and like all of the men was very disappointed to be stationed in Antarctica. Joe wants to radio headquarters as quickly as possible, but the radio is out.

Chabon writes that “[t]he winter drove them mad” (437). For John Wesley Shannenhouse, the winter madness is directed at his perpetual struggle with the Curtiss-Wright AT-32 airplane. The Condor seaplane is 10 years old and was used heavily by the navy before he received it.

Shannenhouse becomes more eccentric, remaining primarily in the hangar and working on the airplane. He attacks Joe if Joe tries to enter. Joe retreats to the radio, working throughout the night repairing it so that they have radio contact again 17 hours after the heater incident. Joe informs Command of their situation at the Kelvinator Station. Joe and Shannenhouse are going to have to hold out until spring, when the navy can send a ship through the ice to get them. Also, Joe is to remain in radio contact and monitor the airwaves for U-boats.

The Drake Passage is teeming with U-boats and Joe is able to intercept some of their communication. Joe also tunes in to other radio programs like the BBC and is thus able to follow the progress of the war. At times, Joe’s anger and frustration with the navy for having sent him to the South Pole causes him to brood. One evening, Joe finds the broadcast from the Reichs-Rundfunk. It’s a broadcast about the Jewish ghetto in Prague. At first, Joe’s hopes run high since the radio program informs the listeners of the decent conditions and health of those living there; however, Joe quickly realizes the broadcast is propaganda and has the feeling that something dreadful has actually happened. Soon after tuning the radio to another channel, Joe confirms the greatest Allied fear concerning Antarctica: The Germans are on the ice. Joe goes to Shannenhouse to inform him of his discovery. Shannenhouse reprimands him for not immediately informing Command and tells him to go do what he’s supposed to and get out of the hangar.

Joe is able to discover the German location at the 30 meridian, on the coast of Queen Maud Land. The bulk of what the Germans are up to is purely observational and scientific. The man on the German radio is a geologist, and Joe discovers that he is now the only one at the German station of Jotunheim and that the Geologist (now capitalized in the novel) is in a similarly lonely situation as Joe and Shannenhouse. The Geologist is alone because one of the two men who were with him shot the other and then himself. Joe is reluctant to inform Command of the identity of the Geologist, feeling that doing so would somehow betray himself:

The desire for revenge, for a final expiation of guilt and responsibility, that had been the sole animator of Joe’s existence since the night of December 6, 1941, received the final impulse it required to doom the German Geologist (447).

The coming of spring means another whaling season and a fresh campaign for the U-boats. U-1421, in particular, has been harassing traffic in the Drake Passage. Joe has been supplying Command with intercepts and directional information for months. Eventually, the Royal Navy sends a few ships from the Falklands and hunts down and sinks U-1421. Joe likes to imagine that perhaps U-1421 was the submarine that sank the ship that Thomas was on.

The sun finally makes an appearance, indicating the coming of spring. Joe goes to the hangar to tell John. Shannenhouse’s features soften a bit at the news. He then wants to know what else Joe wants to tell him. Joe tells him he wants to go kill “Jerry,” and asks if the plane can fly. That’s when Joe realizes that Shannenhouse killed all the dogs except Oyster and used their hides to repair the plane’s canvas.

Fortunately for Joe, his former commander at the station, Captain Fleer, had made plans for just the sort of contingency of moving out onto the ice to attack a possible German base. Joe already knows everything he needs to in order to make his mission possible.

While Joe and Shannenhouse had seen very little of one another since the accident, the prospect of a common enemy and a mission brings them back together and gives them a purpose. Preparations, however, are slow going on account of the ice. At one point, Joe and Shannenhouse use the tractor to pull the plane out of the hanger, and the tractor slides off. The plane suffers some damage. Shannenhouse needs more skins to repair the tear. Oyster is the only dog left. Joe doesn’t put up any resistance and allows John to kill Oyster. The death of his beloved dog pains Joe but he focuses on the mission at hand.

As one of the last preparations, Joe begins writing a letter to Command informing them of his and Shannenhouse’s decision to take the fight to the Germans at Jotunheim. Joe stops typing for a moment and considers that they are going to go kill a man who has done nothing to provoke them or harm them. He had nothing to do with what happened to Thomas, and he isn’t even a soldier: “But these things had, nonetheless, made Joe want to kill someone, and he did not know who else to kill” (453).

Joe knows that reaching Jotunheim is fraught with danger. This knowledge causes him to finally open and read all the letters that Rosa had sent him. The letters are heartfelt and very emotional. Joe learns that Tracy Bacon died in the Solomon Islands, Sammy and Rosa are married, and Sammy quit Empire Comics and went into advertising. He learns about Ethel’s death and about the birth of Rosa’s son. Because he reads all the letters over the course of a short time, Joe realizes that some of the dates don’t add up correctly regarding the birth and comes to the conclusion that the boy must be his. Joe learns the boy’s name is Thomas, named for his dead brother. Joe once believed that he had buried all his love for Rosa when he joined the navy, but he feels his love stirring again while he reads the letters.

Joe writes a short letter to Rosa, telling her that he does not blame her, to forgive him for running away, and to remember him with love because he remembers her and their golden age together. Joe mentions that he knows the boy is his son, but he doesn’t know how to finish the letter. Joe realizes that he doesn’t expect to return from Jotunheim, and even if he doesn’t die, he plans on never visiting Rosa or Sammy ever again, so he pulls the letter from the typewriter and places it in an envelope titled “In the event also of my death” (459). Joe gathers up all the letters from Rosa and throws them in the furnace, then goes to the radio room to tune in to Jotunheim.

The weather isn’t the best, but it seems good enough to finally attempt a flight to Jotunheim. Joe has sent the Geologist a terse message: “WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU” (461). On the third day of their journey, Shannenhouse’s appendix bursts.

Joe is flying the airplane, struggling to maintain altitude and course, and eventually makes a crash landing.

The German Geologist, Klaus Mecklenburg, has been watching the skies over Jotunheim at regular intervals and sees Joe crash and emerge from the wreckage. Joe walks toward Klaus. Klaus is frightened and takes a shot at Joe, hitting him in the shoulder. Klaus shot and killed squirrels when he was a kid but has never fired a pistol. Joe gets up and walks toward him again. Klaus unloads the clip with his eyes closed. After the pistol is empty, he realizes Joe is standing in front of him.

In flawless German, Joe tells Klaus, “I am very glad to be here […] The flight was difficult” (464). Joe puts his hand inside his parka and feels around for a moment. He pulls out a gun. Klaus doesn’t know what to do; he steps back and then lunges at Joe. They wrestle in the snow. Klaus realizes that Joe was not pulling the gun out to shoot him; rather, he was taking the gun out to throw away; that the American was just happy to be alive after the crash. The gun goes off.

Joe drags Klaus back to the Jotunheim Station. Joe is thinking about what he needs to do to try and save him, but the thoughts are in vain:

Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him (465).

After the war, tourists would come by and visit the old German base camp, the original camp from 1913, and witness all the leftover relics, including a perfectly frozen penguin. It was at this base camp that Joe had crawled his way to and was eventually rescued by a navy icebreaker. Joe was in bad condition: a bullet wound in the shoulder, a fractured ankle, and the onset of scurvy, frostbite, and anemia. The medic reported discovering that Joe had gone through, in his time at the camp, two and a half boxes of 30-year-old morphine. Joe was taken to Guantánamo Bay to heal, rest, and await his court-martial. He was there until the day the Allies won World War II. Joe was never court-martialed and received the Navy’s Distinguished Service Cross.

In August 1977, a large chunk of the Filchner Shelf broke off from the icepack and destroyed the German base camp. Tourists would never again be able to look at the piles of empty tins with Edwardian labels, old charts, skis, rifles, racks of unused beakers and test tubes, the frozen penguin that had been killed for dissection but never examined, and the curious drawing of a child showing:

a man in a dinner jacket falling from the belly of an airplane. Although the man’s parachute was far beyond his reach, the man was smiling, and pouring a cup of tea from an elaborate plummeting tea service, as if oblivious of his predicament, or as if he thought he had all the time in the world before he would hit the ground (468).