North Water (McGuire)

The North Water 
Ian McGuire, 2016
Henry, Holt & Co.
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250118141


Summary
A nineteenth-century whaling ship sets sail for the Arctic with a killer aboard in this dark, sharp, and highly original tale that grips like a thriller.

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.

In India, during the Siege of Delhi, Sumner thought he had experienced the depths to which man can stoop. He had hoped to find temporary respite on the Volunteer, but rest proves impossible with Drax on board. The discovery of something evil in the hold rouses Sumner to action.

And as the confrontation between the two men plays out amid the freezing darkness of an arctic winter, the fateful question arises: who will survive until spring?

With savage, unstoppable momentum and the blackest wit, Ian McGuire's The North Water weaves a superlative story of humanity under the most extreme conditions. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1963-64
• Where—Hull, England, UK
• Education—M.A., University of Sussex; Ph.D., University of Virginia
• Currently—lives in Manchester, England

Ian McGuire grew up near Hull, England. He studied at the University of Manchester, the University of Sussex where he earned his M.A., and the University of Virginia where he earned his Ph.D. in 19th-century American literature.

He has taught at Manchester University since 1996, first as a lecturer in American Literature and more recently as a lecturer in Creative Writing. He now co-directs the Centre for New Writing.

Writing
His first novel, Incredible Bodies (2006), a spoof of academic life and ambition, was described as "hugely entertaining" and "a 21st century Lucky Jim" by the (London) Times. The Sunday Times found it "very funny and disconcertingly sad," while John Mullan in the New Statesman referred to it as a "refreshingly low-minded campus novel."

His second novel, The North Water (2016) draws on his knowledge of American literature, particularly Melville. A thriller/adventure/survival narrative, the Independent called it "a stunning achievement, by turns great fun and shocking, thrilling and provocative" as well as "one of the finest books of the year."

McGuire has written and published on Whitman, Melville and Howells, and is particularly interested in the American realist tradition from the 1880s to the present day. In addition, his stories have been published in Chicago Review, Paris Review, and elsewhere. (Adapted from the publisher and Manchester Centre for New Writing.)

Book Reviews
[A] great white shark of a book—swift, terrifying, relentless and unstoppable…[McGuire's] exhaled his knowledge of literature into a gripping thriller that pulses with echoes of countless classics, from Melville's Moby-Dick…to Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket…Mr. 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…it is also genuinely suspenseful, its plot catapulting dangerously toward a fateful confrontation between Drax and Sumner…. [McGuire] 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.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


Ian McGuire's riveting and darkly brilliant novel The North Water…feels like the result of an encounter between Joseph Conrad and Cormac McCarthy in some run-down port as they offer each other a long, sour nod of recognition…. McGuire has an extraordinary talent for picturing a moment, offering precise, sharp, cinematic details. When he has to describe complex action, he manages the physicality with immense clarity. He writes about violence with unsparing color and, at times, a sort of relish…. There is an intensity in the way [the characters] live, breathe, and respond to the world that etches them more deeply on the page and on the imagination of the reader…It is possible at certain moments to sense the battle between [Sumner and Drax] as a clash between darkness and light, good and evil. It is a mark of McGuire's subtlety as a novelist, however, that he leaves this in the shadows while placing at the forefront enough felt life and closely imagined detail to resist any simple categories. He allows each of the two men their due strangeness and individuality.
Colm Toibin - New York Times Book Review


Mesmerizing.... Told in grisly language that calls to mind Cormac McCarthy, The North Water begs such ontological questions as: What profit it a man who saves his skin but misplaces his soul?
Wall Street Journal


It is a vivid read, full of twists, turns, period detail and strong characters. The setting is original too, and the description of harpooning and flensing of a whale have been forever etched on my memory. This melodramatic blood and urine-stained tale is an enjoyable contrast to most literary fiction.
The Times (UK)


Uncompromising in its language, relentless in the unfolding of its blood-soaked narrative, this is not a novel for the squeamish, but it has exceptional power and energy.
Sunday Times (UK)


Terrific, seamed with pitch black humour and possessed of a momentum that's kept up to the final, unexpected but resoundingly satisfying scene….[I]nspired.
Daily Mail (UK)


The strength of The North Water lies in its well-researched detail and persuasive descriptions of the cold, violence, cruelty, and the raw, bloody business of whale-killing.
Guardian (UK)


Compared with this savage tale of Arctic survival, Leonardo DiCaprio’s bear-wrestling ordeal in The Revenant looks like something out of A. A. Milne…. McGuire expertly arranges all this mayhem, and the narrative is horrifically gripping. The North Water is smoothly readable despite the horrors it depicts, and that’s testament to the quality of McGuire’s prose. Such fine writing might have been lifted from the pages of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
Independent on Sunday (UK)


The North Water is a conspiracy thriller stuffed into the skin of a blood-and-guts whaling yarn.... The novel is a stunning achievement, by turns great fun and shocking, thrilling and provocative.... Behold: one of the finest books of the year.
Independent (UK)


McGuire delivers one bravura set-piece after another…. The North Water has, in places, a Conrad–Melville undercurrent, but for the most part it is Dickens’s influence that is most keenly felt….This is a stunning novel, one that snares the reader from the outset and keeps the tightest grip until its bitter end.
Financial Times (UK)


McGuire’s prose is fresh and vivid and his novel as a whole is atmospheric and intellectually fecund. Its surface might be awash with blood; but beneath it flows a current of dark and transporting beauty.
Spectator (UK)


Beware: this book is quite a ride. The violence is ghastly, the queasy sense of moral decay all-pervasive. McGuire makes Quentin Tarantino look like Jane Austen….the language has a harsh, surprising beauty that contrasts the spectacular setting with the greedy bankrupt men who force their way northward, armed with harpoons for slaughter.
New Statesman (UK)


McGuire’s novel is a dark, brilliant yarn set on a 19th-century Yorkshire whaler in the dead of winter.... There is no light, no letup in this gruesome tale, so there is great significance in the rare but moving acts of kindness and camaraderie between these men in peril. An amazing journey.
Publishers Weekly


McGuire delivers not only arresting depictions of bloody destruction, but moments of fine prose that recall Seamus Heaney's harsh music, as when an iceberg is described as "an albinistic butte unmoored from the desert floor." For noirish thrills in an unusual setting, McGuire has the goods and the gore, but this book—graphic in its violence, language, and sexual references—is not for the squeamish.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if they're made available. In the meantime, use these to kick off a discussion for The North Water...then take off on your own:

1. Reviewers have talked about the gruesome writing in The North Water. Were you disturbed by its blood and gore, its overt descriptions of violence? Is the violence sensationalized or is it important to the story? Does it, perhaps, reflect the novel's world view of a life that, in Thomas Hobbes's famous words, is "nasty, brutish, and short"—a world beset with fear, pain, and death?

2. Describe Henry Drax. Is he a monster? The Devil himself? He insists that "the law is just a name they give to what a certain kind of men prefer." What does he mean, and what are the ways in which he acts according to that belief?

3. How do the opening scenes with Drax portend future events or, at the very least, set the novel's narrative tone? What other events foreshadow, or hint at, future plot developments?

4. Patrick Sumner is the book's hero. How does he react to the dishonest, violent men who surround him? Talk about the secret Sumner harbors and the ways it has influenced his life decisions. What are his reasons for joining the whaling expedition? How does he change over the course of the voyage?

5. What do we gradually come to learn about Captain Bownlee?

6. The book suggests that the assertion of decency and morality in the face of corruption and violence is futile. Is that an overly cynical or dark assessment of this story? Is it representative of life in general?

7. Follow-up to Question 6: What is the moral response when horror is at the core of existence as it is on this ship...and in this story?

8. If you've read Moby-Dick or Conrad's Lord Jim or Heart of Darkness, can you identify some of the parallels found in McGuire's novel?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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