Mind Picker: The North Water

I'd venture the Good Lord don't spend much time up here in the North Water... It's most probable he don't like the chill.

By the end of the first chapter of The North Water the reader will witness whoring and drinking and murder and pedophilia, all mired in language as foul as the shite-slick back alleys of a 19th Century fishing port. The writing is urgent and physical, and as an introduction to a story about good and evil (even if the characters themselves don't believe in such labels), you can pretty much tell right away if this book will be your cup of tea (it won't be for everyone). It's a tale historical and philosophical and utterly traditional – there is nary a smug po-mo literary device – and as for me, I'd take another cuppa, ta.

It is a grave mistake to think too much, he reminds himself, a grave mistake. Life will not be puzzled out, or blathered into submission; it must be lived through, survived, in whatever fashion a man can manage.

Set in the late 1850s aboard a Greenland-bound whaler named the Volunteer, although host to an entire cast of memorable characters, this story is really about the conflict between two men: Patrick Sumner, a laudanum-addicted and disgraced ex-army surgeon who can now find no better employment than as the doctor on the reportedly doomed ship; and Henry Drax, a brawny harpooner with uncontrollable, animal needs and absolutely no conscience.

He feels the moment of resistance and then the inevitable and irretrievable give as the bear's spine is split asunder by the milled steel edge. He pulls the spade out and brings it down again, stabbing deeper with each thrust. With the third blow, he pierces the bear's heart and a great purple gout of blood comes steaming to the surface and spreads like India ink across her ragged white coat. The air is filled with a fetid blast of butchery and excrement. Drax feels pleasure at this work, arousal, a craftman's sense of pride. Death, he believes, is a kind of making, a kind of building up. What was one thing, he thinks, has become something else.

Having assembled a ragtag crew of desperate men for his own secret purposes, the whaler's skipper Captain Brownlee can just barely maintain control as shipboard crimes begin to stack up; when Brownlee loses control, the bodies begin to stack up. Add to all of this man-on-man violence the graphic clubbing of seals and the hunting of whales, the struggle to survive in the frozen north, and an opium-fiend doctor whose drug-fueled dreams transport him to his former life in the more humid reaches of the British Empire, and you've got a classic 19th Century adventure tale. Author Ian McGuire updates the format, however, by dropping the formalised language of those days and writing in a lyrical yet gritty style that totally captivated my attention:

From behind him, blowing off the mud-brown cliffs, Sumner hears a sudden uprearing bellow, a vast symphonic howl, pained, primeval, yet human nonetheless, a cry beyond words and language it seems to him, choral, chthonic, like the conjoined voices of the damned. Filled with a moment's terror, he turns around to look, but there is nothing there except the falling snow, the night, and the enormous, empty land off to the west, scarred and unimaginable, wrapping like bark around the planet's darkened bole.

If Drax is the Devil (as some eventually contend), then as his opposite, Sumner is no angel; rather, he is that most noble and cursed of all creatures: an ordinary, flawed man. Providing commentary on the natures of good and evil and God's hand in the fates of men is another harpooner, Otto, who declares himself an adherent of Swedenborg and makes pronouncements such as, “The world we see with our eyes is not the whole truth. Dreams and visions are just as real as matter. What we can imagine or think exists as truly as anything we can touch or smell. Where do our thoughts come from, if not from God?” The conversations between Otto and Sumner allow for some organic philosophising; even if Sumner doesn't believe a word of what the mystical Teuton believes; even as Otto's prophetic visions come to horrifying life around them. The trials that Sumner faces throughout this book prompts a credible transformation of his character, and while there was some satisfaction to be had in the inevitability of the ending, to some extent inevitable = predictable.

All this to say: this is a very exciting, gritty, thought-provoking book. I have yet to read Moby Dick, so I can't make that obvious comparison. And in various reviews, The North Water is compared to other works by Melville, Poe, Conrad, and McCarthy; it is even favourably compared to the movie of The Revenant; it would seem that you can't quite evaluate this book without knowing everything that came before in the genre. I'm supposed to keep in mind that McGuire has studied and teaches the New American Realism, and in The New York Times, author Colm Toibin states, “The tightness of the tone suggests that there is, behind the narrative, a theory being worked out of how historical fiction can be credibly managed now.” I didn't realise that historical fiction has become noncredible (Toibin even states that McGuire's various exciting scenes about bears is, “a feat I had imagined highly inadvisable if not impossible for any contemporary novelist"). So obviously there are technical achievements on display here that are too arcane for this average reader to pick up on, but if McGuire's central goal regards a new theory of historical fiction, I have a small quibble: I was never unaware that I was reading a book released in 2016; the particular crimes were of their day but the presumptive values of the reader are our own. There is some objection to the mistreatment of a polar bear cub and a Greenpeacey conversation about the rapacious overfishing of the whales that had led to their disappearance, and neither of these voiced concerns felt true to the time period. But the most unbelievable scenario involved McKendrick the ship's carpenter: when a cabin boy is found raped and murdered, McKendrick's reputation as a known sodomite puts him under suspicion. Naturally, we of today know that being a gay man doesn't make someone a murderous pedophile, but other than making McKendrick the obvious scapegoat, there wasn't really much outrage about him simply being a gay man; apparently most of the crew knew that he had shared his bunk with other men on occasion, yet shipped out with him all the same? Am I misreading the attitudes of the past? In a country that would imprison Oscar Wilde for homosexuality in another fifty years? Drive Alan Turing to suicide with chemical castration in another hundred? I can only assume that McGuire is technician enough to have made these anachronistic decisions as part of this new theory of historical fiction. And as it all adds up to a spectacular read, I can't say that it doesn't work. One of my favourites from this year's Man Booker Longlist.

The black sky is dense with stars and upon its speckled blank the borealis unfurls, bends back, reopens again like a vast and multicolored murmuration.