There’s news for all the devoted fans of thrillers, adventures and other assorted fast-paced reading who have so long thumbed their noses—and pages—at high-brow literary fiction and its associated industry of reviews and awards and festivals. The borders began to blur a while ago, but here’s the definitive sign that authors, publishers and critics are actively eyeing the vast readership that hides behind covers or Kindles on commutes and waiting rooms.
The North Water, as macho and gory as some “old pulp” titles, is in the longlist for the Man Booker 2016, that acme of literary propriety and properness.
The question, of course, is, does it do enough to woo the reader over from the dark side?
Author Ian McGuire can’t be faulted for effort. Here’s a laundry list of all the pulp tropes that find their way here: whoring, murder, paedophilia, sodomy, another murder. And all this in the first 12 pages.
To house the pace he sets, McGuire chooses the second half of the 19th century and creates an exotic, emphatically male world in the then precariously poised pursuit of whaling. It’s a clever shoehorn that, in one go, pays tribute to multiple fiction-fed ideas of boyhood—solo adventuring, male bonding, man against nature, survival in the wild—while simultaneously allowing McGuire to doff his hat to all those who have gone before, from Herman Melville to Joseph Conrad, besides Jack London and the more recent Michael Punke, author of the 2002 book, The Revenant, that grew into the 2015 film by the same name.
And what do you know, there’s an India connect as well. McGuire’s protagonist is a veteran of the battles of 1857; in fact, the good doctor Patrick Sumner carries a secret—and maybe something more—that ties up with his somewhat inexplicable decision to leave military service for the untested waters of a job as a ship’s surgeon. Sumner, who reads his Iliad in the Greek and likes a drop of laudanum at bedtime, is the prism through which we acquaint ourselves with the captain and the crew as well as the “north waters”, not as teeming with seals and whales as they once were but still promising to make fortunes.
It’s a cruel life and McGuire doesn’t hold his punches. When the crew aren’t slaughtering marine mammals, they’re killing each other, or worse. The ship— christened the Volunteer, with no mean irony, I’m sure—makes for the perfect setting for the closed circle mystery: Bad things happen and the culprits must be on board, but to determine whodunnit is no walk on the ice floe.
Sumner discovers a young deckhand has been brutally raped; a few pages later, the boy turns up dead. A scapegoat with an alleged fondness for underage children is found and though Sumner points out that there is no convincing proof, the captain insists that he be locked up. “Exactly how many sodomites do you think we have crammed into this vessel?” expostulates the captain, and the unfortunate man is chained up.
As true a tribute as The North Water is to the older novels, it is impossible to read McGuire’s matter-of-fact narration of the crew’s plunder of natural resources as anything but an admonishment and a warning. Particularly traumatic is an early episode where they kill a polar bear as her cub watches; later, after they have stripped a whale of its blubber on the deck, the caged, now-older cub smacks down his playmate, the ship’s dog, in a casual iteration of meaningless, random violence.
The North Water might be faithful to the ethos of the commercial fiction of the era it evokes—the stereotypical characters, the simple plot line, the play-like dialogue—but it is in these Conrad-esque nuances for contemporary concerns that McGuire asserts himself as an author of, and for, our times. It is a full-bodied, warm-blooded book that’s almost camp in its use of tropes and set-pieces but there’s no mistaking McGuire’s control over his material or his skill.
Especially noteworthy is the way he uses olfactory imagery to evoke a scene: “farts and pipe smoke and spilled ale” at a tavern, the “sour, bathetic pong” of the dockyards, the “noxious, sulphurated reek” of whale blubber rotting in the ship’s casks, “a foetid blast of butchery and excrement” as a bear is killed. I can’t remember the last time I smelt a book as I read it.
As to the question of whether thriller fans will be convinced to give a longlisted book a shot, I haven’t a clue. All I know is, once you start reading The North Water, it’s pretty much impossible to put down.
