THE NORTH WATER (2016)
By Ian McGuire
Henry, Holy &
Company, 255 pages.
Ian McGuire @ReadingsBooks #northwater
★★★★

Tragedy is tragedy, but we often stereotype it as well. Think
of exaggerated paintings of saw-toothed whales chewing up hapless sailors, or
of crews being led to their doom by mad captains like Herman Melville's Ahab.
Ian McGuire has a different take on why a whaler's life was often short and
brutish: many of them were brutes. Many
who 'read' Moby Dick skim or skip
didactic chapters to get at the more thrilling material. But if you take the
time to delve into the chapter titled "The Try-Works," you'll quickly
learn that it took a taste for blood, filth, violence, and stink to stomach
(literally) a whaler's life. In The North
Water, Cetacean hunters fall into two categories: the ones with something
to hide and those so far beyond the margins that they know longer bother with
social pretenses.
The novel is set in 1859, a time in which whaling is on its
last fins—a victim of over-harvesting and obsolescence occasioned by cheaper
coal gas and petroleum. When Captain Arthur Barlowe agrees to skipper The Volunteer, he does so with the
foreknowledge that it may well be its last voyage. As it is, he's headed for the
Canadian Arctic pretty late in the season as that's where, if anywhere, sperm
whales can be taken (as well as seals, foxes, and polar bears). In the waning
days of the trade, recruitment was even more from the fetid bottom of the
barrel. Barlowe's crew consists mostly of poverty-stricken Shetland islanders
and dodgy characters scrounged from English ports of call. The curiosity is
greenhorn ship surgeon, Patrick Sumner, who formerly served with the British
army in India. What could possibly motivate such a learned man to give up the
warmth of the South Asian sun for the gray waters of the North Atlantic and the
ice of the Arctic? The rest are a rank (physically and morally) collection of
drunkards, drug-addled fools, buggerers, thieves, cutthroats, and those with
more crabs in their groins than teeth in their heads.
On such a ship, Otto, the German Swedenborgian fatalist, passes
for normal. Everyone seems to have an agenda: Sumner, Barlowe, ship owner Jacob
Baxter, First Mate Michael Cavendish, amoral harpooner Henry Drax…. The problem
is, none of the agendas match. McGuire's yarn is a good one, though it's
decidedly not for the squeamish. Cruelty toward animals and one's fellow man
are staples of The North Water;
treachery, double cross, roguery, and degradation are subthemes. McGuire's
description of the Arctic chills in various ways. He skillfully weaves many
strands, develops complex characters, dabbles in foreshadowing, and brings
matters to a satisfying conclusion without being as wordy as, well, Herman
Melville. Nor does he sacrifice drama or intrigue for the sake of economy. In
fact, in places The North Water is
evocative of Joseph Conrad's Heart of
Darkness, if I can be forgiven for substituting the barren Arctic for the
lush Congo. By the time you've finished McGuire, you will have marooned all romantic
notions of whaling on a Baffin Islands ice sheet.
Rob Weir
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