North Water (McGuire) - Book Reviews

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