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A review by mikerickson
The North Water by Ian McGuire
3.0
He leans in harder, presses, seeking out the vital organs. The lance slides in another foot. A moment later, with a final roar, the whale shoots out a plume of pure heart's blood high into the air and then tilts over lifeless onto its side with its great fin raised like a flag of surrender. The men, empurpled, reeking, drenched in the fish's steaming, expectorated gore, start up their flimsy boats and cheer their triumph. Brownlee on the quarterdeck wafts his billy-cock hat in circles above his head. The men on the deck roar and caper.
Jesus Christ this book was b l e a k
Granted, I wouldn't expect a wilderness survival story set on a ship in the 1850's at the tail-end (pardon the pun) of the whaling industry would be all roses and sunshine, but there were some rough passages in here that would make even Jack London blush. We're talking about a group of shipwrecked survivors forced to mix their own blood with flour just so they'd have something to eat. We're talking not one but two grizzly (again, pardon the pun) scenes involving polar bears. There's an extended and brutal flashback of the British siege of Delhi from the perspective of a surgeon on amputation duty. Multiple instances of seals being killed. Surgery without anesthetics, etc.
And what really gets me is that a lot of it didn't seem necessary? When you get down to it, the very bones of this story, stripped away of all the smaller scenes where the gruesome shit happens... is actually pretty good! There's conspiracy, there's secret allegiances, there's one of the best betrayals I've ever read, and then a murder mystery crops up halfway through the book on top of all of that. I didn't need all these gory bits sewn in between to hold my interest; I was already enraptured and if anything these side scenes were driving my interest away.
In retrospect, I shouldn't have been so surprised because in the first chapter we see a major character murder a complete stranger with a brick merely because he wanted to, and then later that same night go on to rape a black teenage boy (the N-word gets dropped a lot in this book, so heads up for that). If a reader manages to get through that in just the opening scenes, I guess there's a sort of tacit acceptance of whatever comes after. I can't deny that that first chapter didn't set the tone for the rest of the book.
I enjoyed the superstructure/the skeleton of this story, and the protagonist goes through a satisfying character development and is very much a different person by the end of the book; it's all the stuff in between that first left me squeamish and then just numb. If you've got a strong stomach and wanna read about a bunch of dudes having a really awful time in the Arctic dealing with the elements in addition to one of the most fucked-up antagonists I've encountered, give this one a go.
Jesus Christ this book was b l e a k
Granted, I wouldn't expect a wilderness survival story set on a ship in the 1850's at the tail-end (pardon the pun) of the whaling industry would be all roses and sunshine, but there were some rough passages in here that would make even Jack London blush. We're talking about a group of shipwrecked survivors forced to mix their own blood with flour just so they'd have something to eat. We're talking not one but two grizzly (again, pardon the pun) scenes involving polar bears. There's an extended and brutal flashback of the British siege of Delhi from the perspective of a surgeon on amputation duty. Multiple instances of seals being killed. Surgery without anesthetics, etc.
And what really gets me is that a lot of it didn't seem necessary? When you get down to it, the very bones of this story, stripped away of all the smaller scenes where the gruesome shit happens... is actually pretty good! There's conspiracy, there's secret allegiances, there's one of the best betrayals I've ever read, and then a murder mystery crops up halfway through the book on top of all of that. I didn't need all these gory bits sewn in between to hold my interest; I was already enraptured and if anything these side scenes were driving my interest away.
In retrospect, I shouldn't have been so surprised because in the first chapter we see a major character murder a complete stranger with a brick merely because he wanted to, and then later that same night go on to rape a black teenage boy (the N-word gets dropped a lot in this book, so heads up for that). If a reader manages to get through that in just the opening scenes, I guess there's a sort of tacit acceptance of whatever comes after. I can't deny that that first chapter didn't set the tone for the rest of the book.
I enjoyed the superstructure/the skeleton of this story, and the protagonist goes through a satisfying character development and is very much a different person by the end of the book; it's all the stuff in between that first left me squeamish and then just numb. If you've got a strong stomach and wanna read about a bunch of dudes having a really awful time in the Arctic dealing with the elements in addition to one of the most fucked-up antagonists I've encountered, give this one a go.