<p>The North Water<br />Ian McGuire <br />Scribner UK<br />2016, pp 336, Rs 1,459<br /><br /></p>.<p>The North Water, Ian McGuire’s savage new novel about a 19th-century Arctic whaling expedition, is a great white shark of a book — swift, terrifying, relentless and unstoppable.<br /><br />It is also as epically bloody as a Jacobean drama or a Cormac McCarthy novel. One man has his head bashed with a brick, and “there is a fine spray of blood and a noise like a wet stick snapping.” Another is bludgeoned with a piece of whalebone. A sailor is nearly decapitated with a saw blade. Two boys are raped and murdered. Two Eskimo hunters are killed while they sleep. And an oarsman’s arm is ripped off by a polar bear.<br /><br />These events are described in gruesome detail worthy of a horror movie, as is the slaughter of whales and seals — shot, harpooned, clubbed, gutted and cut into oozing, greasy pieces. All of which is served up to us not just with gory visuals, but with sick-making sounds and smells too.<br /><br />McGuire is not reveling in such Sweeney Todd splatter effects simply to be sensational; rather, he puts them in the service of a Hobbesian view of life as nasty, brutish and short, and plagued by fear and violent death. His vision and his story owe a lot to McCarthy’s operatic masterpiece Blood Meridian, and his villain Henry Drax often comes across as a combination of the demonic Judge Holden in Meridian and the sadistic bully Wolf Larsen in Jack London’s 1904 classic, The Sea-Wolf.<br /><br />Drax is a monster, perhaps the devil himself, who “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.” He is an unrepentant killer who asserts that “the law is just a name they give to what a certain kind of men prefer.”<br /><br />These are only the most obvious influences on The North Water — the tip of the iceberg, as it were. McGuire, who is a founder and a director of the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, in England, hasn’t written a postmodern or self-consciously literary novel here; rather, he’s exhaled his knowledge of literature into a gripping thriller that pulses with echoes of countless classics, from Melville’s Moby-Dick (an ill-fated whaling expedition, a fascination with evil and the destructive element in nature and in man) to Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (a hallucinatory journey to the South Pole, where extremes of weather fuel existential questions of identity and death).<br /><br />As for the novel’s hero and Drax’s chief adversary, Patrick Sumner, he’s clearly a descendant of Melville’s Ishmael and Conrad’s Lord Jim. Like Jim, we learn, he is hiding a shameful secret from his past — which is how he’s ended up taking an ill-paying job as a whaling ship’s doctor.<br /><br />In the hands of a less-gifted writer, all this might have turned into a weak stew of borrowed plot points and motifs, but McGuire is such a natural storyteller — and recounts his tale here with such authority and verve — that The North Water swiftly immerses the reader in a fully imagined world. Though the novel is pockmarked with overly portentous teasers of the action to come, it is also genuinely suspenseful, its plot catapulting dangerously toward a fateful confrontation between Drax and Sumner.<br /><br />Sumner was a surgeon with the British Army in India, ministering to wounded troops during the bloody siege of Delhi, and to suppress his memories of what happened there, he has become addicted to laudanum. He hopes that the whaling journey to the far reaches of the Arctic north will be an antidote to the heat and stench he remembers from India, that the voyage represents a second chance for him. Instead, he finds himself sucked into yet another maelstrom of violence and betrayal and depravity.<br /><br />The beastly Drax — who has ferreted out the truth of what happened to Sumner in India — is not the only one aboard the whaler Volunteer who is up to no good. The captain, Brownlee, who lost his last ship (“crushed to matchwood by a berg” — “eight men drownded and 10 more perished of the cold”), seems to be involved in some kind of insurance scam with the ship’s owner. And the surly first mate, Cavendish, appears to be in cahoots with Drax, plotting to steal Sumner’s most cherished possession, a ring that is a token of his experiences and losses in India.<br /><br />McGuire nimbly folds all these melodramatic developments into his story as it hurtles toward its conclusion. He has written an allusion-filled novel that still manages to feel original, a violent tale of struggle and survival in a cinematically beautiful landscape reminiscent of the movie The Revenant, but rendered with far more immediacy and considerably less self-importance.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The North Water<br />Ian McGuire <br />Scribner UK<br />2016, pp 336, Rs 1,459<br /><br /></p>.<p>The North Water, Ian McGuire’s savage new novel about a 19th-century Arctic whaling expedition, is a great white shark of a book — swift, terrifying, relentless and unstoppable.<br /><br />It is also as epically bloody as a Jacobean drama or a Cormac McCarthy novel. One man has his head bashed with a brick, and “there is a fine spray of blood and a noise like a wet stick snapping.” Another is bludgeoned with a piece of whalebone. A sailor is nearly decapitated with a saw blade. Two boys are raped and murdered. Two Eskimo hunters are killed while they sleep. And an oarsman’s arm is ripped off by a polar bear.<br /><br />These events are described in gruesome detail worthy of a horror movie, as is the slaughter of whales and seals — shot, harpooned, clubbed, gutted and cut into oozing, greasy pieces. All of which is served up to us not just with gory visuals, but with sick-making sounds and smells too.<br /><br />McGuire is not reveling in such Sweeney Todd splatter effects simply to be sensational; rather, he puts them in the service of a Hobbesian view of life as nasty, brutish and short, and plagued by fear and violent death. His vision and his story owe a lot to McCarthy’s operatic masterpiece Blood Meridian, and his villain Henry Drax often comes across as a combination of the demonic Judge Holden in Meridian and the sadistic bully Wolf Larsen in Jack London’s 1904 classic, The Sea-Wolf.<br /><br />Drax is a monster, perhaps the devil himself, who “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.” He is an unrepentant killer who asserts that “the law is just a name they give to what a certain kind of men prefer.”<br /><br />These are only the most obvious influences on The North Water — the tip of the iceberg, as it were. McGuire, who is a founder and a director of the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, in England, hasn’t written a postmodern or self-consciously literary novel here; rather, he’s exhaled his knowledge of literature into a gripping thriller that pulses with echoes of countless classics, from Melville’s Moby-Dick (an ill-fated whaling expedition, a fascination with evil and the destructive element in nature and in man) to Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (a hallucinatory journey to the South Pole, where extremes of weather fuel existential questions of identity and death).<br /><br />As for the novel’s hero and Drax’s chief adversary, Patrick Sumner, he’s clearly a descendant of Melville’s Ishmael and Conrad’s Lord Jim. Like Jim, we learn, he is hiding a shameful secret from his past — which is how he’s ended up taking an ill-paying job as a whaling ship’s doctor.<br /><br />In the hands of a less-gifted writer, all this might have turned into a weak stew of borrowed plot points and motifs, but McGuire is such a natural storyteller — and recounts his tale here with such authority and verve — that The North Water swiftly immerses the reader in a fully imagined world. Though the novel is pockmarked with overly portentous teasers of the action to come, it is also genuinely suspenseful, its plot catapulting dangerously toward a fateful confrontation between Drax and Sumner.<br /><br />Sumner was a surgeon with the British Army in India, ministering to wounded troops during the bloody siege of Delhi, and to suppress his memories of what happened there, he has become addicted to laudanum. He hopes that the whaling journey to the far reaches of the Arctic north will be an antidote to the heat and stench he remembers from India, that the voyage represents a second chance for him. Instead, he finds himself sucked into yet another maelstrom of violence and betrayal and depravity.<br /><br />The beastly Drax — who has ferreted out the truth of what happened to Sumner in India — is not the only one aboard the whaler Volunteer who is up to no good. The captain, Brownlee, who lost his last ship (“crushed to matchwood by a berg” — “eight men drownded and 10 more perished of the cold”), seems to be involved in some kind of insurance scam with the ship’s owner. And the surly first mate, Cavendish, appears to be in cahoots with Drax, plotting to steal Sumner’s most cherished possession, a ring that is a token of his experiences and losses in India.<br /><br />McGuire nimbly folds all these melodramatic developments into his story as it hurtles toward its conclusion. He has written an allusion-filled novel that still manages to feel original, a violent tale of struggle and survival in a cinematically beautiful landscape reminiscent of the movie The Revenant, but rendered with far more immediacy and considerably less self-importance.<br /><br /></p>