The North Water

By Ian McGuire

Simon & Schuster, $38



Ian McGuire's The North Water is a novel that swims in the wake of a much bigger, greater novel and when you learn that the book's subject is 19th century whaling, you will immediately know that the greater novel is Moby-Dick. McGuire is clearly not shy of the comparison. The first words of Moby-Dick are "Call me Ishmael". The opening line of The North Water is no less Biblical: "Behold the man."

As in Herman Melville's novel, we see a crew assemble ahead of a difficult voyage based on secret motivations. In Moby-Dick, it was in New York; in The North Water it is in Hull, McGuire's home town, depicted as a hell hole of the north. Pub violence, feral children, prostitutes — call it Deadwood by the sea. McGuire's "behold the man" is intentionally sarcastic. The man we are asked to behold is the drunk, cowardly, murderous Henry Drax, who is about to join the Volunteer as a harpooner.

McGuire takes a low view of humanity and lays the grimy realism on thick. Here is a typical sentence: "The air is filled with a foetid blast of butchery." At times the writing is florid gore cataloguing man's inhumanity to man, and to seal, whale and polar bear (a particularly nasty scene). The point is made early on — that whaling was a savage and vicious business — and then it is repeated and repeated. But it lacks Moby-Dick's vastness and metaphysical dimension. The novel starts to seem relentless and one-dimensional.

The base Drax is one-dimensional himself. Instead of Melville's Ahab, we have the much less interesting Captain Brownlee. McGuire is wise to shift his focus to the more complicated and thoughtful figure of Patrick Sumner, an opium-addicted ex-army surgeon who reads Homer in his cabin and saw action in India. There is a detailed flashback to a massacre. McGuire's point is that whether on sea or on land, the Empire was kept alive by waste and horror. It ran on whale oil and the blood of others.

McGuire's research skills are obvious and he finds fresh, inventive ways of describing murder and slaughter, as well as their aftermath. Nineteenth century life among desperate men is as dark as you could have imagined: the cabin boy is not just sodomised, he is also strangled and hidden in a barrel, "like some monstrous fungal knottage"; the polar bear is not just stabbed, shot at and skinned, its young is left howling at the corpse. A frozen body is "throat-gashed, bibbed and spewed over with blood". And so on. You need a strong stomach for this harpoon porn.