North Water by Ian McGuire

Some members had real difficulties with July’s offering, The North Water by Ian McGuire.

Several told me they could not get past the foul language and the graphic violence and stopped reading at about 50 pages.

Others of us for whom the C-bomb has become almost as routinely heard from the mouths of our adult children (females and males) as the F-word, and who could deal with the more harrowing episodes and learning new information that perhaps we didn’t need to know about the effects on the human body of certain abusive acts, pressed on and became absorbed by the plot and the fine descriptive passages describing harsh Arctic landscapes and historic details (presumably well researched) of the brutish life for sailors aboard a whaling ship in the 1850s and in the brothels and taverns of the ports they visited.

This book is unusual in that we find out who the murderer is very early in the story. Not for the faint hearted are the author’s descriptions of everyday cruelty towards animals and the defenceless. But these are the times when lives were, as Thomas Hobbes had earlier described, as “poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. (In Leviathan, actually a fair bit earlier - 1651.)

One member said it could be argued that until comparatively recent times ‘civilisation’ and the ‘rule of law’ have constituted a rather thin veil which could be quickly and easily torn when a man holding a gun/exerting physical intimidation could easily gain influence over ‘lesser’ mortals, returning relationships to the law of the jungle, particularly in situations of isolation and peril. (In these circumstances, for that matter, what’s changed today?) In this novel, you are certainly left to ponder what makes a ‘good’ man and how people in extremis can still cling with hope to their philosophies and faith in the face of acute physical sufferings and fear.

The North Water was published last year by English author and academic, Ian McGuire. It is his second novel. It was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and was voted one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2016. It also received the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award this year for the best second novel of a published author.

Dr McGuire's focus of academic interest is American realist literature (and there are echoes in The North Water of Moby-Dick, for those of you familiar with Herman Melville’s writing). He has written several non-fiction books on the subject.

Spoiler alert:

One final comment - It is true that you are often able to suspend your credulity for the sake of a good plot in books (and even more so, I think, in movies) but I did have difficulties with imagining how an uneducated English sailor could marshall and harness the Eskimos’ dogs and get them to pull a sled for him to effect his escape…. Without knowing how the dogs worked together.… Or any words of the Eskimo language…. And quietly.

Happy reading!