On The North Water

I found Ian McGuire while piecing together our new digital archive: his story “The Red Monk” appears in our Spring–Summer 2001 issue. His first novel, The North Water, wouldn’t debut until fifteen years later, in the spring of 2016. The story is about the six-month expedition of the Volunteer, a ship coughed out to sea in the last gasp of the whaling industry, just as the reliance on blubber is giving way to coal oil. It’s an ill-manned vessel populated with villains and fugitives—two in particular: Patrick Sumter, an Irish field-surgeon, and Henry Drax, a brutish harpooner—who rape, murder, and steal from each other on the journey. While a novel like Blood Meridian—to which, along with Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness, McGuire’s debut alludes often—suggests existential and metaphysical purpose to nihilistic violence, The North Water makes no effort to elevate its characters’ brigandry. The worst of these men possess virtually no interiority, no emotion. They act on primal impulse and greed, and any abstract explanation to their degeneracy is supplanted by McGuire’s impressive and relentless focus on the physicality of whaling expeditions: the slimy resin of blubber, the stink of a grown man’s shit, the taste and gelatinous texture of a seal’s eyeball. It’s a terrifically grotesque novel with the thrilling inertia of adventure/survival narratives; once I started it, I had a hard time stopping.  —Daniel Johnson