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The North Water

Ian McGuire (Goodreads Author)

3.99 · Rating details · 22,437 ratings · 2,801 reviews

Behold the man: stinking, drunk, and brutal. Henry Drax is a harpooner on the Volunteer, a Yorkshire whaler bound for the rich hunting waters of the arctic circle. Also aboard for the first time is Patrick Sumner, an ex-army surgeon with a shattered reputation, no money, and no better option than to sail as the ship's medic on this violent, filthy, and ill-fated voyage.

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Paperback, 272 pages

Published March 14th 2017 by Picador (first published February 11th 2016)

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Mar 17, 2016 Jeffrey Keeten rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, the-sea

”There is no sin left now, there is only the blood and the water and the ice; there is only life and death and the grey-green spaces in between. He will not die he tells himself, not now, not ever. When he is thirsty, he will drink his own blood; when he is hungry, he will eat his own flesh. He will grow enormous from the feasting, he will expand to fill the empty sky.”

The Yorkshire whaler named the Volunteer is on its way to the Arctic Circle to hunt for whales. While other whalers go South, ...more

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Nov 20, 2015 Doug H - On Hiatus rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: advance-copy

Jack London on Steroids!

This novel contains foul language, horrific gore, rape, murder, animal cruelty, and other examples of total moral bankruptcy and I absolutely loved it.

Why? How could I?

I loved it for the author’s laser-focused descriptive writing and realistic character development. I loved it for its highly suspenseful story and well-researched and seamlessly-blended historical detail. I loved it for its outward exploration of the Arctic world and for its more inward moral and ...more

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Aug 20, 2015 karen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: live-through-this, thanks-for-prezzies

congratulations! semifinalist in goodreads' best historical fiction category 2016!

"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 ...more

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Nov 10, 2016 Tatiana marked it as dnf · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017, historical, booker

I would call this dicklit. I reserve this identifier for pseudo-manly books, like The North Water, which pretends to be some kind of deep, tough literature, but fails to hide that its author has an almost juvenile obsession with violence, gore and bowel movements. This is not grit, this is garbage.

I am judging Hilary Mantel for blurbing this so hard right now...

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Jun 24, 2017 Paul Bryant rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: modernvictorian, novels

Scene 1

Enter a man followed by a man

Man : Whut? Awk! (dies)

Scene 2

Enter a whale followed by several whalers

Whale : Aw shit! Ugh! No! (dies)

Scene 3

Enter a dog followed by a bear

Dog : Yah! Fuck you! Bark! (dies)

Scene 4

Enter a bear followed by a man

Bear : Aw hell, no – urghhhh! (dies)

Scene 5

Enter three men

First man : (dies)

Second man : (dies)

Scene 6

Enter an author

Ian McGuire : And that’s how you get four stars from Paul Bryant. Easy!

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Jan 01, 2017 mark monday rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: all-fucked-up, into-the-past, world-of-insects, mnemonic-devices, blood-and-danger

synopsis:
grueling misadventures on a 19th century whaling ship.

well I suppose I have to admire how sustained the effort is. Ian McGuire is relentlessly focused on the visceral, that's for certain "...they drip not blood, as usual, but some foul straw-colored coagulation like the unspeakable rectal oozings of a human corpse..." yeah that phrase pretty much sums up the novel. the author wants to repel the reader. very little depth and zero resonance but a whole lot of brutality, atrocity, and ...more

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Jan 30, 2018 Katie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, published-2016

The North Water takes us into a coarse masculine world where all the better qualities of humanity are hard to find. Sumner, a disgraced surgeon, is constrained to find employment on a whaling ship at a time when the need for whale oil is declining. There’s immediately something suspicious about the real task the owner of The Volunteer has set its captain. The crew of the ship are a motley rabble of ruthless and desperate men. Sumner, the surgeon, is an innocent by comparison. He’s addicted to The North Water takes us into a coarse masculine world where all the better qualities of humanity are hard to find. Sumner, a disgraced surgeon, is constrained to find employment on a whaling ship at a time when the need for whale oil is declining. There’s immediately something suspicious about the real task the owner of The Volunteer has set its captain. The crew of the ship are a motley rabble of ruthless and desperate men. Sumner, the surgeon, is an innocent by comparison. He’s addicted to laudanum and reads Homer. His nemesis is a man called Henry Drax who in the first chapter is shown beating unconscious and raping a young boy. More about him later.

Early on, there’s a recurring motif – if a child or an innocent creature appears you know it’s going to meet a nasty end. I found he used this tactic one time too many and it became overly predictable. The first chapter especially began to seem heavy handed, a rather cheap ploy to create tension. There’s later a scene where baby seals are clubbed to death which, though hard to read, did effectively show how brutalised these men had become and set the atmosphere in which these men lived. They live in a world where blood, pus, excrement, bile are the visuals of everyday. Civilisation’s pretty facades have all been worn thin to reveal the stinking liquid fundament of life. Once the voyage is underway the descriptive writing is brilliant, especially of the merciless arctic landscapes. Pretty soon it acquires the fast-paced momentum of a thriller.

The weakest link of the novel for me was Henry Drax, the epitome of pure evil who never quite convinced me as anything but a convenient and rather unsophisticated plot device. The arctic setting, so brilliantly evoked, provided the novel’s moral vacuum much better than Drax did. This is a world where life is cheap and motive rudimentary. The duplicitous plan of the owner provided the tension. Drax, on the other hand, was close to cartoon baddie. He belongs in a novel by a lesser writer. But I’m still giving it five stars for how vividly it dramatized its landscapes and how excitingly it swept along. ...more

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Jan 07, 2016 LeAnne: GeezerMom rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: polar-ice, buddy-reads, litmus-test

Quick. Name the baddest bad guy you've ever read. Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist? Javer from Les Miserables? Hannibal Lecter? Serena Pemberton? Cathy Ames? Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden or Anton Chigurh?

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce a new boy to the club of horror. "... and something else, something wholly different, has appeared instead. This courtyard has become a place of vile magic, of blood-soaked transmutations, and Henry Drax is its wild, unholy engineer."

While blurbs will Quick. Name the baddest bad guy you've ever read. Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist? Javer from Les Miserables? Hannibal Lecter? Serena Pemberton? Cathy Ames? Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden or Anton Chigurh?

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce a new boy to the club of horror. "... and something else, something wholly different, has appeared instead. This courtyard has become a place of vile magic, of blood-soaked transmutations, and Henry Drax is its wild, unholy engineer."

While blurbs will tell you this is a story that takes place aboard a whaling ship in the late 1800s, nothing can quite prepare us for the key words in the above quotation: vile, blood-soaked, unholy, Drax. Let me reiterate the term blood-soaked.

Yes, as a reader, it's going to cost you. Just the tail end of the first little chapter will have you wincing and percolating anger toward Henry Drax. The next five chapters introduce abundant blood from seals, bears, sailors, and of course whales. While we are calibrating the Offense Meter, you need to know that while I've read lots of novels where F bombs were dropped like they were D-Day ordnance or something, I've never heard the C-word used so frequently. I eventually became entirely immune to it and feared I'd see some idiot driver on the road in front of me and mutter *c@#t* in front of my kids or something. o_O

Having skimmed this review, probably a good 80% of you now have no desire to take a look at this Man Booker nominee. But let me share with the other 20% how excellent it is! This is at heart a story about good and evil, adventure, dire conditions, and fortitude. While the description of field-dressing seals isn't going to give us practical life skills, the barbarity of these actions puts us firmly on the ice pack freezing our butts off. The author grabs us by our white collars and off our cozy sofas and directly into the late 1800s and the frigid north water. The suspense and cold and isolation are as much characters in the tale as anyone else, and it is no surprise to learn that the author is a professor of literary realism. Now, all the fabulous professional reviews out there are pointing out the parallels with Moby Dick (hello, Captain Obvious), but here is a fantastic little Easter Egg most missed and that ties to author McGuire's taste in reading.

His sociopath in this story, Henry Drax, has sailed to the Marquesas in the past we are told. We further learn Drax was aboard the ship called Dolly, and his fellow harpooners tease him by faux-accusing him of cannibalism (not that he would be above cannibalism). While Herman Melville is most widely known for Moby Dick, his earlier book Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life has a character who sails aboard the fictional craft Dolly and ends up living amongst cannibals. What an homage! This little tidbit and other sprinkles of dark humor were merely the tip of the iceberg in my enjoyment.

We also find some calm mysticism on shipboard, comparisons between Eskimeaux gods and doctors, disbelief in environmental fragility, and the evil nature of profiteers. There are themes examined in here that fit the 1800s perfectly but are echoed today as well.

Patrick Sumner, a surgeon wounded in the Siege of Delhi, is the quiet hero of the story, an imperfect man who cannot forgive himself for his failings. His boyhood experiences give him a soft spot for children, and while he tries to help those in peril, fate steps in to take control. When he eventually discovers what a monster Henry Drax is, he cannot get away from him. Trapped on a whaling ship in the middle of nowhere, packed in by polar ice, escape will have to come in a different form. Justice is even more unlikely.

While the first 50 or 60 pages (five or six chapters) were bloody hell to get through, from that point forward, I could not put this story down. I usually like my villains to show a touch of humanity here or there to make them more real, but instead Drax's failings were able to conjure believability for me by the story's conclusion.

As for the ultimate close to the book, it felt a bit abrupt for my liking. So much so that while this was a solid five star read, the last half chapter fell short of the meteoric reading experience that led up to it. Overall, 4.5 icy stars for the Irish surgeon Sumner who kept me there with him to the top of the world and back. ...more

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Jan 17, 2018 Andrew Smith rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Andrew by: Glenn Sumi

I’ve read plenty of crime fiction in my time, some of it graphically violent. And I’ve come across some bad men too, violent sociopaths who have occasionally haunted me long after the final page has been turned. But I’ve never before come across a book so brutal, so unmercifully unsettling and savage as this one. From practically the first page it slapped me across the face, dragged me across the room and slammed me against the wall. I loved it!

It’s 1850’s England and we are first introduced to I’ve read plenty of crime fiction in my time, some of it graphically violent. And I’ve come across some bad men too, violent sociopaths who have occasionally haunted me long after the final page has been turned. But I’ve never before come across a book so brutal, so unmercifully unsettling and savage as this one. From practically the first page it slapped me across the face, dragged me across the room and slammed me against the wall. I loved it!

It’s 1850’s England and we are first introduced to harpooner Henry Drax who is about to board a whaling ship, the Volunteer, on its journey to the Artic. But before he walks up the gangplank he has time to brutally kill a man he’s only briefly encountered in a bar and then heartlessly beat a young boy unconscious before raping him. Yes, Drax is a man you’ll do well to avoid. Then we meet up with former army surgeon Patrick Sumner who will be acting as the ship’s medical man. At first we learn little of Patrick’s past but we do glean that he’s got a penchant for opiates. We will be fed more of his story, in flashbacks, as the novel progresses. These two are at the heart of this tale.

But there are some interesting secondary players too, and then there’s life aboard the Volunteer itself – the appalling conditions and the primitive, almost feral nature of the crew. As if this isn’t enough atmosphere in itself, McGuire also throws in the wildly inhospitable nature of the Artic weather. All of this is put together brilliantly by the the author. The language is rough – very rough – but seemed, to me at least, to be a convincing interpretation of 19th Century life amongst this group of ruffians.

The Volunteer was embarking on it’s voyage at a time when whale fishing was in a declining state, with paraffin and coal oil beginning to replace whale oil. As the voyage progresses we learn that there’s a sub-plot orchestrated by the owner of the ship, with the ship’s captain as willing accomplice, to scupper the vessel in order to claim the insurance money. How will this play out and what is to become of Drax and Sumner?

I was drawn so deeply into this story I felt like I held my breath throughout its entirety. It’s a masterful piece of work. Certainly not for anyone without the stomach for some blood and gore, but if this is no impediment and you’re up for an authentic adventure story that’ll get your blood flowing then look no further. ...more

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Jul 15, 2017 Robin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: those with a strong stomach

Shelves: 2018, literary-fiction, thriller, english, booker-prize-nominated

Ungodly stenches, thick bloody discharges, sluicey shits dropped from the sides of boats, ursine gore, carnage of baby seals, rape, more than you could ever imagine knowing about blubber, murder.

Just a few of the things you can expect to read about in this no-holds-barred Victorian adventure on a whaling ship. Sounds good, right?

It is. Really, really good.

Long-listed for the 2016 Booker Prize, I feel the same delight in its nomination that I did for His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the ...more

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Apr 30, 2018 Matt rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, the-sea

“Otto crouches in the bows with the harpoon’s wooden shaft gripped tightly in his fists. With a giant horselike snort…the whale exhales a V-shaped flume of grayish vapor. The boat and crew are temporarily obscured, but when they reappear, Otto is on his feet and the harpoon is poised above his head – the barb pointing downwards and the shaft forming a black hypotenuse against the sullen sky. The whale’s back looks…like a sunken island, a grainy volcanic hump of rock peeping from the waves. Otto ...more

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Sep 25, 2016 Ɗẳɳ 2.☊ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Ɗẳɳ 2.☊ by: The Shayne-Train

Shelves: historical-fiction, goldilocks-zone, grit-lit

Now this, this is the adventure I’ve been looking for! I couldn’t help but notice several reviewers comparing this to a Jack London tale, and it’s hard for me not to follow suit. As a kid, I was a big fan of Mr. London. I especially loved his Alaskan adventures, which opened my eyes to a place so remote and far removed from my everyday life experiences that it made my head spin. I longed to set a course into that uncharted wilderness. Those books filled me with a wanderlust which still consumes ...more

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Aug 16, 2016 Agnieszka rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed, 2018, ebook, beyond-the-horizon

A very good reading. Gripping and engrossing even if at most times truly gruesome. I know some readers were whining on mega-literality in characterising people and their deeds, couldn't stomach scatological descriptions and direly vulgar language, well, the proverb to swear as a sailor didn’t come out of nowhere, I suppose, found some protagonists exaggerated, cartoonish and grotesque even and filthiness and all this mindless brutality just put them off. I can see their point. Really. But it
A very good reading. Gripping and engrossing even if at most times truly gruesome. I know some readers were whining on mega-literality in characterising people and their deeds, couldn't stomach scatological descriptions and direly vulgar language, well, the proverb to swear as a sailor didn’t come out of nowhere, I suppose, found some protagonists exaggerated, cartoonish and grotesque even and filthiness and all this mindless brutality just put them off. I can see their point. Really. But it doesn’t change the fact I found The North Water well written and well paced story.

Yes, there are some expressively rendered protagonists, there is a foul language and whole obscenity imaginable, there is blood, guts and body fluids, there are scents and views that could upset your stomach, there is a ship though its true mission in the course of events is to show rather opposite than most of participants of the voyage were in the first place informed of, there is a whalehunting, and bears, there are rapes and murders and violence, there is cold and ice, and darkness. And even more darkness. Yes, The North Water has it all, but if the novel dealt with evil and brutalization and barbarism such an approach and language was in my eyes justified. You may of course disagree with me.

Some words about main protagonists. Harpooner Drax is a nasty piece of work indeed, amoral, despicable and so depraved that it feels almost unreal, it’s barely a spoiler, we meet the guy and get to know his face just on first pages. He seems to embody some primary force and instinct, he’s pure evil but his cruelty doesn’t spring from thoughtlessness, he definitely is a cunning and manipulative miscreant. For his opponent is designated doctor Patrick Sumner, a bit shadowy figure, who emerged out of nowhere, from India to tell the truth, and who likes to spend his leisure time in laudanum-induced daze. What is he running from ? What does he want to forget about? Against sinister personality and strength of Drax our Doc seems to compare not that commandingly. Sometimes I thought the first one was too diabolique to take him seriously while the second one remained too undeveloped character. From other heroes I'd like to mention yet harpooner Otto, a huge man fascinated with Swedenborg's mysticism and through its lens trying to grasp nature of good and evil and things that happened to hapless sailors through their doomed voyage.

One of the most recognisable villains in literature ever remains to me judge Holden from McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West. I thought this novel was stunning and brilliant and stark and absolutely unforgettable reading experience. I’m not saying McGuire with his reading is in the same league only that the level of bestiality and depravity seems to be quite comparable. It’s a bit like one of McCarthy’s characters enlisted on that whaler. Both authors seem to think of ruthlessness and cruelty to be immanent attribute of human nature, directed not only at fellow human being but discernible in its approach to animals and nature as well.

I’m attracted to novels that are set in extremely conditions, that test people’s endurance and fortitude or just the opposite that explore man’s meanness in the hour of trial. I love reading about polar expeditions, mountain climbing or ill-fated voyages. And this novel appeared to perform the conditions pretty successfull even though in the last part it seemed to lose some of it initial panache. But if you prefer to avoid in your readings very graphic scenes of violence and abuse this one may not be very suitable for you.

3,5/5 ...more

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May 09, 2018 Beverly rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Sep 14, 2016 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read2016, booker-winners-and-listed, cold-weather-islands

I started this because it was named to the Man Booker Prize longlist in 2016, and I was hearing good things about it from some of my reading friends. Despite not being named to the short list, I decided it was worth finishing.

I feel two ways about this novel. On the one hand, there is some very violent stuff in this book. Rape and murder and guiltless violence all around. There are frequent derogatory words directed at other races and women. But on the other hand (and forgive me but there really ...more

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Jun 27, 2017 Char rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: to-be-read-wish-list, from-library, audio-book, historical-fiction

The North Water is a savage, harsh, gory, dark fiction story taking place mainly on a whaling vessel in the 19th century. Ever moving north in search of the dwindling whale population, the realities of life are hard enough for these men, never mind the serial killer/child molester hiding among them.

I listened to this on audio and the narrator John Keating was most excellent. I would love to hear more of his work in the future.

I enjoyed the hell out of this brutal story, but it's not for ...more

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Nov 06, 2015 Susan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

It is 1857 and a whaling ship is about to leave for the Artic. With Mr Baxter as the wily financier funding the expedition and an assembled crew which includes Captain Brownlee, perceived as ‘unlucky’ by the men, Dr Patrick Sumner, an Irish surgeon with secrets and, oh yes, a vicious murderer called Henry Drax.

This is a dark and unsettling novel. The outline of the story may make it seem like a murder mystery, but this is far more literary fiction than a thriller. The writing is violent and ...more

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Dec 27, 2017 Michael rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A deep, dark, unflinching, and unsparing account of men battling the elements, each other, and, for the most part, themselves. The character of Drax was the most non-cartoonishly evil character I'd encountered in a long time. But of course this only made me wonder: is that even possible? Isn't such a pure distillation of evil necessarily cartoonish? I wondered several times this as I read--whether every awful thing he did was meant merely to shock--but in the end the story carried me along its ...more

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Jun 24, 2017 PirateSteve rated it liked it · review of another edition

""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""

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Aug 03, 2017 William2 rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Darkness, darkness. In the early 1860s a whaling expedition is undertaken from Hull, Yorkshire, at a time when the demand for whale oil has fallen due to a new discovery, fossil oil. The voyage is doomed from the start since the ship must go down in order for the avaricious shipowners to collect the insurance money. The vessel is crewed, among others, by a homicidal maniac incapable of remorse, and a ship's surgeon, just cashiered from the British Army after the Indian Mutiny, who's a laudanum ...more

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Dec 15, 2016 Glenn Sumi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Every year I come across a book or two that I want to press on EVERY reader I know. This, after just a few salty pages, quickly became one of them. Keep in mind: if savage language and limb-tearing action makes you queasy, it might not be for you. Furthermore, try to read this in the winter. I bet your chilly, slushy commute ain’t got nothing on what the characters in this book endure.

The North Water is about a doomed expedition heading up to the Arctic Circle. It’s the 1850s, and the whaling industry is dying, whale oil having being replaced in general use by different kinds of fuel.

Nevertheless, the ship Volunteer is heading up from England to the icy north. Onboard are a couple dozen men, each with complex histories. These include the captain, Brownlee, whose previous whaling trip ended in financial disaster; harpooner Drax, a sadistic, murdering, amoral brute whom we meet (boy, do we ever meet him) in the first pages; and Sumner, the ship’s educated Irish doctor, who once had a promising career in the army but is now, thanks to an unfortunate incident in India, looking for any kind of work to support his opium addiction.

In 250 efficient, evocative pages, Ian McGuire takes us on this unforgettable trip, making us see, smell, taste and hear the perilous journey. He has absolute mastery over the tale; the language feels authentic, the plot moves swiftly, and the characters interact in a way that never feels contrived.

It’s an adventure, a murder mystery, a historical snapshot and a cultural eye-opener. The passages involving the Eskimos the seamen meet are fascinating, and there’s a sensitive subplot involving a simple whaler who is ostracized for being homosexual (I suppose the word “gay” wouldn’t apply to him then).

If I have one criticism, it’s that the inevitable stand-off between the two main characters, when it comes, happens too quickly. Surely McGuire could have extended it.

But how often do we want sections to keep going longer, so we can savour the details? That’s how damn great this book is. ...more

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Mar 25, 2016 Tom Mathews rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: people who like good man-against-nature tales

Shelves: read-in-2016, adventure, not-for-the-squeamish

I’m not overly squeamish. In the last couple years I have read Blood Meridian, reputedly Cormac McCarthy’s bloodiest work, and The Ruins, by Scott Smith, another notoriously sanguineous selection. But it wasn’t until I was reading this book that I realized that I needed a bookshelf for books that are ‘not for the fainthearted’.

The North Water reads like Jack London on crack. It is an extremely visceral story of the final days of the whaling boom when, in order to hunt the ever dwindling herds ...more

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Oct 12, 2016 Julie rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 21st-century, british, click-lit

Other than the fact that someone seems to have had some potty-training issues as a toddler, this book was pretty good. I'm employing only the mildest irony.

I say that because this book is filled with the stench of mid-19th century aromas from the privy, for the most part. McGuire really likes to indulge in the smells of a more malodorous age, packing the book with instances, on just about every page, with some mention of smells of urine and faeces and beer-laden farts. It's really a teen boy's ...more

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Aug 17, 2016 Peter Boyle rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, booker-nominee

If you like your historical fiction bleak, bloody and barbarous, then Ian McGuire's Booker long-listed The North Water is the one for you. Think Moby Dick by way of Quentin Tarantino and you're not far off.

It tells the story of a doomed whaling voyage in the 1850s. The Volunteer sets sail from Hull with the motliest of crews, made up of brutes and savages and skippered by the dubious Captain Brownlee. In the first few pages we meet Henry Drax, a vicious harpooner with a thirst for murder. He If you like your historical fiction bleak, bloody and barbarous, then Ian McGuire's Booker long-listed The North Water is the one for you. Think Moby Dick by way of Quentin Tarantino and you're not far off.

It tells the story of a doomed whaling voyage in the 1850s. The Volunteer sets sail from Hull with the motliest of crews, made up of brutes and savages and skippered by the dubious Captain Brownlee. In the first few pages we meet Henry Drax, a vicious harpooner with a thirst for murder. He casually slaughters a drinking partner and rapes a young boy in the harbour before even setting foot on the ship. "The law is just a name they give to what a certain kind of men prefer," Drax declares. Clearly not an upstanding member of society. We follow the action mostly through the eyes of Patrick Sumner, an Irish surgeon who is both mentally and physically burdened from serving in the siege of Delhi. He seems to be one of the few morally sound people on board, even if he has a few skeletons in his own closet. But will he survive the unforgiving Arctic conditions and this dangerous, unscrupulous crew?

The graphic violence in this absorbing, fast-paced novel has drawn comparisons to the more gruesome aspects of Cormac McCarthy's work. I wouldn't consider myself squeamish in the least but I must admit to wincing at some of the more grisly passages:

Cavendish, without raising the rifle from his hip, tilts the barrel upwards and shoots him through the throat. The top portion of the Shetlander's skull detaches and flies backwards against the steeply pitched canvas roof, leaving a broad red bulls-eye and, around it, a fainter aureole of purplish brain matter.

I quite enjoyed The North Water for the most part. It is a gripping tale of survival and a convincing vision of legendary nautical adventures, populated with a cast of memorable characters. McGuire's sharp dialogue and stylish prose help to create an unnerving atmosphere of peril and suspense on the high seas. However the violence eventually loses its power to shock because of its frequency. And while it is an entertaining story, there is nothing particularly *new* here - I don't really understand why it is deemed Booker worthy. I would describe The North Water as a very well-written thriller rather than literary fiction. It's an enthralling, vivid and unsettling novel. ...more

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Jan 23, 2017 Laura rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Laura by: Doug H - On Hiatus

Shelves: a-team-group-read

5 stars....highly recommend. It is graphic, but it is entertaining. Adventure, murder, damning evidence (unique twist), deceit, character study, and medical procedures....this book has it all. If you are looking for very well written book with lots of action, take a peek at this novel. Recommended by GR friend Doug.

4.5 stars (reread Jan 2018 for A-team book club)

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Jul 11, 2016 Roger Brunyate rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: place-portraits

A Pungent Horror

Behold the man.

He snuffles out of Clappison's courtyard onto Sykes Street and snuffs the complex air—turpentine, fishmeal, mustard, black lead, the usual grave, morning-piss stink of just-emptied night jars. He snorts once, rubs his bristled head, and readjusts his crotch. He sniffs his fingers, then slowly sucks each one in turn, drawing off the last remnants, getting his final money's worth. At the end of Charterhouse Lane he turns north onto Wincolmlee, past the De La Pole

A Pungent Horror

Behold the man.

He snuffles out of Clappison's courtyard onto Sykes Street and snuffs the complex air—turpentine, fishmeal, mustard, black lead, the usual grave, morning-piss stink of just-emptied night jars. He snorts once, rubs his bristled head, and readjusts his crotch. He sniffs his fingers, then slowly sucks each one in turn, drawing off the last remnants, getting his final money's worth. At the end of Charterhouse Lane he turns north onto Wincolmlee, past the De La Pole Tavern, past the sperm candle manufactory and oil-seed mill. Above the warehouse roofs, he can see the swaying tops of main- and mizzenmasts, hear the shouts of the stevedores and the thump of mallets from the cooperage nearby.

These are the opening sentences of Ian McGuire's second novel, short-listed for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. It is easy to see why Hilary Mantel praises it so highly on the cover: this description of a seaport in the mid-nineteenth century is reminiscent of the Thamesside squalor at the beginning of her own Wolf Hall, and both owe much to Dickens. Note how many of the senses McGuire brings into play even in this short excerpt: smell, feel, taste, locomotion, sight, and sound. But note too his pungent world: the man just emerged from a whorehouse, the morning-piss stink. If anything disturbs you about the intensity of writing like this, better not read on. For in this story of a doomed whaling voyage up to the mouth of the Northwest Passage and beyond, Ian McGuire leaves nothing out—no possible evocation of blood, gore, and excrement, no description of man's cruelty to animals and his fellow men, no depth of degradation. It is great writing, I see that, but really tough going. And this opening gives only the faintest hint of what is to come. I will include a more typically intense excerpt later, but will hide it as a spoiler.

In essence, this is a nineteenth-century story told with a modern sensibility, a Moby-Dick of a sort, written in language that Melville's sailors must surely have used, but would never have found its way onto his pages. The man who emerges from the brothel as the book opens is a harpooner, Henry Drax. Before shipping out on the Volunteer the next morning, he has a few more urges to satisfy, and drink and violence are not the last of them. The next chapter will give us a very different figure, the protagonist Patrick Sumner, an Irish surgeon, battered by his own bloody experiences in the Indian Mutiny, and with secrets that he covers with lies. The Volunteer's captain, Brownlee, is glad to have a gentleman aboard and asks no questions; nor does he question too much the crew they pick up at the Shetland Islands as the vessel sails north. For whaling—and sealing, even worse—is no task for the faint of heart, and we soon get hints that the ostensible object of the trip is not the real one.

Once you get used to the language and have learned to stomach the horror, the story grips you like a terrier and shakes you every which way round. First, we have the scenes of hunting itself: shooting and clubbing the seals, an encounter with polar bears, the almost orgiastic killing of the whale and dismembering of its stinking corpse. Then it becomes clear that there may be a killer on board the ship itself. But then a different kind of disaster strikes, and the novel becomes a story of arctic survival under appalling conditions; it is clear that this is a voyage from which few will emerge unscarred, or even alive.

It is exciting and brutal. But the worse things get, the more McGuire turns to higher things, such as human decency, religious faith, and the nature of good and evil. Sumner calls himself an atheist: he mocks his shipmate Otto who quotes the philosophy of Swedenborg; he accepts the hospitality of a Catholic priest in his lonely mission, but not his faith; he submits to being treated as a spirit by the Esquimaux themselves. All the same, he is not entirely unaffected—a fact I welcomed as it gives dimension to a tale that, however exciting, was tending to stay too close to the ground. But even as the author is becoming the philosopher, his appetite for physical disgust increases also. This is a terrific book if you can take it, but it is only fair to warn you with a sample. The passage below describes an emergency operation by Sumner to lance an abdominal abscess filled with pus. If you think you can handle it, read on; it is no better and no worse than the many other such descriptions; the spoiler is for intensity only, not plot. If you would rather not, then better leave the novel alone also; though exciting in its mounting horror, it most certainly is pungent!

(view spoiler)

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Aug 30, 2017 Alex rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: baby seal clubbing enthusiasts

Shelves: 2017

Best Book of 2016 About Clubbing Baby Seals

and look, if you're thinking well I am certainly not interested in reading about baby seal clubbing - it gets super into it, too, it describes them waddling desperately away but the thing with baby seals is they're so slow - does this sound awful to you? You won't like anything else about this book either. I give it five stars. My Tinder profile says "Enjoys books about clubbing baby seals."

clubbing_baby_seal

I'm probably, what, the ten millionth person to do this shitty ...more

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Apr 16, 2016 Rebecca rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: maritime-adventure, reviewed-bookbrowse, polar-regions, historical-fiction, victorian-pastiche, booker-longlisted, read-via-netgalley, dirty-realism

A gritty tale of adventure and murder set aboard a mid-nineteenth-century whaling ship. Archaic adjectives pile up in a clever recreation of Victorian prose: “The men, empurpled, reeking, drenched in the fish’s steaming, expectorated gore.” Much of the novel is bleak and brutal like that. There are a lot of “F” and “C” words, too, and this is so impeccably researched that I don’t doubt the language is accurate. McGuire never shies away from the gory details of life, whether that’s putrid smells, ...more

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Jan 03, 2018 Diane Barnes rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This is a truly wonderful adventure/thriller book, excellently written, well plotted, and characters that could almost be touched and smelled, they were so perfectly portrayed. Good and evil on a whaling boat venturing into the far north, I read this on an afternoon of a rare snowstorm where I live in the South, so the falling snow and grey skies just added to the atmosphere of the novel.

Not sure what this says about me, but the violence, blood and gore, and ruthless killing of both men and ...more

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Aug 20, 2016 Viv JM rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-historical, thriller, read-in-2016, audio, author-male

3.5 stars, rounded up for its sheer exuberance.

The North Water is certainly not for the faint-hearted. It tells the tale of the ill-fated voyage of a whaling ship in the 19th century. It is violent and shocking in places, with plenty of blood, guts and lurid descriptions of bodily fluids. The body count is pretty high. It is certainly not my usual read, but nevertheless I found it thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining. I am slightly perpelexed by its inclusion on the Man Booker longlist, as it ...more

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About Ian McGuire

Ian McGuire

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Ian McGuire is the author of The North Water published by Henry Holt in March 2016. Ian grew up in East Yorkshire, and studied at the University of Manchester in England and the University of Virginia in the United States. He is the co-founder and co-director of the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing. He has published short stories in The Paris Review, The Chicago Review and ...more