Review: The North Water

The North Water by Ian McGuire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Think of Herman Melville by way of James Ellroy.

At its best, this is a novel that finds a fresh way to interrogate the nature of human depravity, to explore what happens to our humanity when we find ourselves face to face with a natural world that has no room for civilized mores.

At its worst – which is still awfully good – it’s an adventure story with an unusual capacity for presenting the physical and historical details of a time before our technology insulated us from the perpetual danger of storm and winter.

We get, in essence, a showdown here between two deeply flawed men. Henry Drax is so vile that he can sullenly select a man at random and kill him, that he can casually bludgeon and sodomize (the novel’s word) a boy when the urge finds him. And lest you think that’s a spoiler, it all happens in the first handful of pages.

Patrick Sumner is a surgeon, but he’s also an opium addict in disgrace after taking a foolish chance during the British conquest of India. He has no qualms about lying to others, and he has no clear loyalties.

Both men find themselves on a whaling voyage into the arctic at the end of the profitable window for whale-hunting. There is [SEMI-SPOILER] a mercantile plot by the ship’s owner to have it sunk so he can claim the insurance money and rid himself of investments he’d prefer to put into the coming market for coal, and the result is a voyage even more hazardous than anyone could have expected.

McGuire apparently has a background as a historian, and it shows. He has a deep sense of both the everyday lives of 19th century mariners as well as a broad feel for the ways in which the historical moment was changing. The age of sail is dying; there’s less and less reason for men to risk their lives in arctic ice when, soon enough, it will be a matter of steam and – for the U.S. – a brutal civil war that will show how much our technology can overwhelm us.

He also has a sense of the moral conflict in play. There is something beautiful and wild in the savagery of a bear, something we see reflected in both the amorality of Drax (who’s made his career as a top-flight harpooner) and in the fluid morality of Sumner. Each is reflected in the wild creatures of the novel – in particular the bear – and when this is at its best, we’re called on to measure what it means to be human against such wildness.

There are voices of seeming decency. We meet a thoughtful harpooner who’s taken with Swedenborgism and who talks about all existence as a reflection of God’s love and light. We meet a priest who’s determined to convert the Inuit to Christianity, and who wants to do so without the barbarism of some conversions. Each gets a chance to be articulate, but McGuire skillfully relegates them to whispers against the larger wind of simple survival as Drax and Sumner experience it.

The showdown, then, -- and this is where the James Ellroy thread is clearest – comes down to whether it’s better to reject all of what we think of as decent or simply most of it. That is, is it better to root for a vicious killer and rapist like Drax – who is deeply suited to survive the most hostile of worlds – or to support a man like Sumner who isn’t sure he stands for anything as he relies on luck to get by?

The first four-fifths of this is flat-out gripping, and McGuire keeps it all moving with real skill. I confess [SPOILER] to a little disappointment with the ending, though. We learn early that Baxter, the corrupt owner of the ships, plans to scrap them. It’s not until the very end, though, that it becomes apparent that Drax is part of his scheme. That strikes me as a flaw in the plot since Baxter has better placed men than Drax to further his plan. It’s Drax’s rashness that’s caused much of the difficulty on the doomed voyage, and it seems to me Baxter would be shrewd enough not to rely on the man.

There’s a rewarding final showdown between Drax and Sumner, but I think there are ways McGuire might preserve that without casting Drax as an agent of the larger mercantile plot. (I’d like to see Sumner and Drax take down Baxter together and then have their showdown.)

I thought of that disappointment as perhaps knocking this one down a star, but, when I sit back and consider the deep excellence of the story, its description, and the moral questions it raises, I’m happy to keep trumpeting this as one that I think a lot of people will enjoy. I certainly did, and I’m hoping McGuire puts out another one before too long.


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