The North Water by Ian McGuire
My rating: 4/5 cats
“I’d venture the Good Lord don’t spend much time up here in the North Water,” he says with a smile. “It’s most probable he don’t like the chill.”
if Moby-Dick; or, The Whale had been more like this, i would have loved it. note to melville – next time, less rope & anatomy, more murder & brutality. you’re a young kid, hermie, you’ll get there…
this book is grit lit gone to sea, where all the staples of the genre: the violence, the desperation, the struggles of the working-class, the moral relativism; where capital-m men doing all the shit that needs doing, be it difficult or shady, are shoved into a nineteenth-century whaling boat and headed up north to the arctic circle to harpoon some whales.
and then it’s just one horrible thing after another.
not only is it all the horrible things that always happen on whaling boats in the nineteenth century – where it’s cold and the food sucks and it’s smelly and on a good day there’s the danger of sharp objects being flung around on an unstable foundation by men who are likely very drunk at a gigantic creature who does not want to have sharp objects thrown at it and will thrash about frantically, but here there’s also blackmail, secret agendas, the violent sexual assault of a cabin boy, murrrrderrrrs and…henry drax.
drax is absolutely the star of this here show. he is man at his most unadorned and uncivilized, in many ways more beast than man; He grasps on to the world like a dog biting into bone – nothing is obscure to him, nothing is separate from his fierce and sullen appetites.
but although he is driven by these animal appetites and impulses, he also has a man’s ability to scheme, to calculate, which makes him a most dangerous beast indeed. although he claims “I’m a doer, not a thinker, me. I follow my inclination,” that in itself is a deception in the interests of self-preservation, and one which drax equates with any other animal trait: He finds the lying comes easy enough, of course. Words are just noises in a certain order, and he can use them any way he wishes. Pigs grunt, ducks quack, and men tell lies: that is how it generally goes.
he’s neither antihero nor villain, although he does some truly horrific things. he’s something more elemental, primal; something predating social expectations, and so exempt from judgment on those terms: Drax’s barnyard scent, dense and almost edible, dominates the room. He is like a beast at rest in its stall, Sumner thinks. A force of nature temporarily contained and pacified.
and do you know what happens to people who don’t trouble themselves with human niceties or the law?
they fucking survive.
oh, and it is quite a spectacle.
this book is just a wonder. it’s brutal and disgusting and contains some of the most vivid writing i have ever come across. this is not a spoiler, but it’s a *very* long passage describing what happens when the whalers discover the floating carcass of a whale already starting to bloat and deciding to take what they can from it anyway, their hunt having been so unsuccessful. it’s fantastic writing, and it makes whaling sound exciting, unlike that other bloated whale carcass of a book.
View Spoiler »there are many battles here: man v man, man v nature, man v whale, man v bear, bear v airedale …
and oh my god, that baby bear. everything about that situation was so intense and heart-punching and yet another part of this book that just resonates with meaning and metaphor and life bursting at the seams.
Sumner looks down at the bear still straining at its rope end, still gasping and growling and scratching at the deck in a primitive and implacable fury.
and the TOOTH??? don’t even get me started on that. in your eye, hercule poirot!
it’s a nice balance between gross n’ bloody action and wilderness survival story and hard-living philosophy, where drax is basically the embodiment of nietzsche (in terms of his moral philosophy, not so much in his murdery parts), in conversations where sumner plays the straight man, forced to ask all the boring and obvious questions like, “You have no conscience then?” while the shackled drax gets to deliver all the fuck, yeah lines like:
“One thing happens, then another comes after it. Why is the first thing more important than the second? Why is the second more important than the third? Tell me that.”
and
“You please yourself, as I please myself. You accept what suits you and you reject what don’t. The law is just a name they give to what a certain kind of men prefer.”
and there’s even a little stage-wink to nietzsche, Talking to Drax is like shouting into the blackness and expecting the blackness to answer back in kind.
there’s way more to this book than drax. the dark past-having, opium-sucking ship’s physician sumner gets much more stage-time, but he’s just so much less fun. and that’s why 4 stars instead of 5, even though it’s a very high 4. it just got a little dull for me at the point where it became sumner doing his thing among the esquimaux. but then – it rallied like a mofo for an excellent ending that was SO fast-paced and satisfying, i forgave it those dull 70 pages or whatever.
fantastic book, with many thanks to the shayne-train, who has written a really fun, and much shorter, review.
tl;dr: The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge + grit-ship-lit, or, a more disgusting Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
