Grueling work in a frozen hell for little pay with death always in the offing. Gee, how could anyone resist a prospect like that?
I looked forward to reading this novel quite a bit due to its subject and the warm critical reviews it received. Although I’m the world’s cruddiest sailor (stir up the water in a bathtub and I’ll get seasick), sagas of grueling sea voyages during the age of sail have always fascinated me. The Hornblower series delighted me as a child and I also got a big kick out of Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny On The Bounty. I also read Moby Dick when I was about fifteen and even went through the long, nonfiction section of the novel where Melville described the 19th-Century whaling industry in fascinating detail (to me anyway). More recently, I enjoyed reading Nigel Cliff’s account of Vasco Da Gama’s historic circumnavigation of the African continent.
So with all that nautical lit background, I read McGuire’s North Water with much anticipation. While I think that the work is a solid piece of literature, I do have a few criticisms. Let’s deal with the positive aspects first. McGuire has a deep understanding and knowledge of the historical period about which he writes, mid-19th Century Great Britain. At the same time, he never falls prey to one of the worst temptations a historical novelist must deal with, the proclivity to include entirely too much information about a particular era to the detriment of the novel’s plot. His prose is also solid and he’s a proficient enough writer to show character rather than tell, that is, he lets the characters’ actions bring out their true natures. McGuire also has a gift for generating suspense. He effectively involves the reader in the desperate, repeated dangers faced by ordinary seamen aboard a whaling ship and does a vivid job of portraying the terrifying, body and soul destroying rigors involved in survival in an Arctic environment. McGuire is also plainly aware of the literary traditions that he works within, paying indirect tribute to the previously cited Moby Dick.
At the same time, I must say I thought the author’s treatment of his subject was rather cursory. The novel is pretty short, not much more than two hundred and fifty pages. While that leaves plenty of room to write a taut, effective narrative, it still seems rather puzzling (and dissatisfying) to have an author take on traditional, old fashioned themes (men at sea, the clash between good and evil, the essential nature of human character) and not deal with it at the magisterial, comprehensive, Olympian level of literature employed by such 19th Century masters as Hugo and Dickens. For example, while I think that the author does a good job of tracing the protagonist’s evolution from a defeated, ineffectual sad sack to a tough, determined man of the world, it seems to me that this could have been done more believably and interestingly if McGuire had allowed himself more scope.
A last point of criticism: the dichotomy between the novel’s hero, Patrick Sumner, and its villain, the harpoonist Henry Drax, often seems overly stark. While Sumner is portrayed as weak, fallible, and full of doubt, Drax is shown as always certain, in fact apparently superhuman, much like the line from the Yeats poem: “And the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity.” The author does seem to intimate at several times during the course of the novel that Drax is somehow close to immortal, not subject to the regular rules of reality that usually trip up and destroy human beings. Without trying to give anything away to anyone who hasn’t read the novel, the sudden reversal of this tension at the end of the novel was rather jarring to me and detracted from the book’s persuasiveness as a work of fiction.
Despite these criticisms, I still think that The North Water is a well written, literary adventure novel that merits reading. I recommend it to anyone interested in sea literature.