Review: "The North Water," Ian McGuire

By Paul Carrier

The Volunteer, a Yorkshire whaler, sets sail for the Arctic Circle in 1859, ostensibly in search of the increasingly rare and elusive creatures to be found in those waters. The crew has some luck early on, but the prey in Ian McGuire’s novel is primarily human, as the voyage descends into a nightmare of greed, desperation, degeneracy and death.

In short order, a cabin boy is sexually assaulted and murdered by a truly heinous crewman named Henry Drax. He later kills the captain, Arthur Brownlee, and injures the first mate, Michael Cavendish, before being shackled below decks, pending trial if and when the Volunteer ever returns to England.

The crew is disheartened and shaken by Drax’s treachery as the Volunteer proceeds ever northward, and icebergs grow in size and number. At least the men have their ship to shelter them, until Cavendish, who’s in on a plot cooked up by the ship’s owner, deliberately sinks the heavily insured vessel.

The scheme is an elaborate one in which the Hastings, a British whaler sailing nearby, is supposed to rescue the crew of the Volunteer. But the Hastings and all her hands are lost at sea in the ice-filled waters, leaving the stranded crewmen of the Volunteer to fend for themselves under their acting captain, Cavendish, a crude braggart who talks a good line but has few skills.

Predictably, things go from bad to worse.

Thanks to its language and violence, The North Water is not for the faint of heart; its pages overflow with butchery of and by humans and animals. But it is a masterful example of historical fiction that is compelling on several levels.

McGuire offers up a detailed look at the logistics and mechanics of whaling, as well as movingly descriptive passages about the brutally beautiful, unforgiving world in which the crewmen of the Volunteer find themselves.

“Through a stuttering veil of snow he sees at the floe edge a bluish iceberg, immense, chimneyed, wind-gouged, sliding eastwards like an albinistic butte unmoored from the desert floor. The berg is moving at a brisk walking pace, and as it moves its nearest edge grinds against the floe and spits up house-size rafts of ice like swarf from the jaws of a lathe.”

Despite the novel’s dark tone and sometimes cringe-inducing subject matter, McGuire finds room for dollops of wit.

Patrick Sumner, an Irish doctor unfairly cashiered from the British army who sails aboard the Volunteer as ship’s surgeon, suspects he will not have to treat many cases of gonorrhea among the crew, “since whores in the Arctic Circle are likely to be thin on the ground.” Inuits listen politely to a priest prattle on about Jesus and decide his words “make a kind of sense, but they find the stories far-fetched and childlike.”

Sumner proves to be the novel’s protagonist, with Drax playing a crucial secondary role. The former is a broken but essentially principled man, the latter a malevolent brute who doesn’t so much think as act on impulse. Although Sumner is addicted to opium in the form of laudanum, he is medically competent, respectful of the largely inexperienced crewmen (“the filth and shite of the dockyards,” Brownlee calls them), and reasonable in an unreasoning environment.

The North Water is a taut and gripping novel in which the antidote to depravity is not goodness but a kind of anemic morality characterized by the absence of perversity.