The North Water - BookWyrm

Kathrin Passig reviewed The North Water by Ian McGuire

Review of 'The North Water' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Hier hat jemand alle Highlights aus der Polargeschichte in einem einzigen Roman untergebracht: Walfang! Vom Eis zerquetschte Schiffe! Kannibalismus! Blizzardüberstehung in ausgehöhlten toten Tieren! Aufbegehrende Schiffsbesatzungen! Das absonderliche Leben der Esquimaux! Blinddarm-Notoperationen im ewigen Eis! Zum Ausgleich ist das alles eher gleichmütig dahinerzählt, "wozu soll ich mir groß Mühe machen, diesen Mord dramatisch auszugestalten, drei Seiten später kommt ja eh der nächste, da werden sich meine Leser schon nicht langweilen". Auch mit Rätselraten, wer der Mörder sein könnte, muss man seine Zeit nicht vertun, er wird gleich im ersten Kapitel namentlich genannt. Und wie die Geschichte ausgeht, wird ungefähr nach der Hälfte von jemandem mit seherischen Fähigkeiten vorhergesagt. Frauen kommen ausschließlich als Besitzerinnen von Vaginas (ungewaschenen) vor, aber es ist immerhin ein Handlungsort, der das vertretbarer erscheinen lässt als die meisten anderen.

(Aus Spoilervermeidungsgründen sind nicht alle meine Angaben zum Inhalt 100% korrekt.)

Ikwezi reviewed The North Water by Ian McGuire

Review of 'The North Water' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I am a sucker for lovingly-rendered stories of doomed ships in exotic waters, but while I could not get enough of his verbiage describing the Arctic sea and ice, I grew tired of the far greater amount of words he devoted to describing the butchering of seals, polar bears, whales, sharks, and people. For all that brutality, he could at least have killed everybody.

John reviewed The North Water by Ian McGuire

Review of 'The North Water' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Amazing. Brutal. If Cormac McCarthy and Herman Melville had co-written The Revenant, but wanted it to be less uplifting and whimsical, it would be a bit like this.

otrops reviewed The North Water by Ian McGuire

Review of 'The North Water' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

I'm frankly surprised that I finished this book. I never finished Moby Dick because of one passage that described the floating carcasses of whales. The North Water is, in parts, far more gruesome. And yet, I couldn't stop reading.

The deaths of seals, whales, sharks, polar bears and human being are described in graphic detail. But these various and clearly described deaths never overwhelmed me. What was overwhelming were the reactions—both animal and human—to those deaths.

This is how the book drew me in. Human beings in the most adverse conditions imaginable, surrounded by death, dealing out death. Somehow, in the middle of the carnage, the characters retain their humanity. And some of them don't.

I realized that these exquisite descriptions of horrific deaths are essential. Without them, there would be no central mystery to this novel. There would be no way to explore the line between retaining your humanity …

I'm frankly surprised that I finished this book. I never finished Moby Dick because of one passage that described the floating carcasses of whales. The North Water is, in parts, far more gruesome. And yet, I couldn't stop reading.

The deaths of seals, whales, sharks, polar bears and human being are described in graphic detail. But these various and clearly described deaths never overwhelmed me. What was overwhelming were the reactions—both animal and human—to those deaths.

This is how the book drew me in. Human beings in the most adverse conditions imaginable, surrounded by death, dealing out death. Somehow, in the middle of the carnage, the characters retain their humanity. And some of them don't.

I realized that these exquisite descriptions of horrific deaths are essential. Without them, there would be no central mystery to this novel. There would be no way to explore the line between retaining your humanity and losing it.

Maybe I'll go back and reread Moby Dick.

markm reviewed The North Water by Ian McGuire

Review of 'The North Water' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

A ripping good novel with an interesting damaged protagonist. There is great olfactory imagery ("...begins to smell the Queen’s Dock—its sour, bathetic pong, like meat about to turn."), many excellent turns of phrase with intriguing word choices, e.g. lazar for leper, a spate of medical tongue descriptions, and an open contaminated abdominal wound left to heal by secondary intention! Best of all, the structure and content of the story are a clear attempt to revisit the thematic material of Moby Dick. Overall, I would have to rate this as swell.

Shawn Towner reviewed The North Water by Ian McGuire

Review of 'The North Water' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

After reading this book, [b:Moby-Dick|153747|Moby-Dick; or, The Whale|Herman Melville|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327940656s/153747.jpg|2409320], [b:In the Heart of the Sea|17780|In the Heart of the Sea The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex|Nathaniel Philbrick|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1335902168s/17780.jpg|1640941], and [b:The Terror|3974|The Terror|Dan Simmons|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1442713631s/3974.jpg|3025639] (which isn't a whaling story, but it's still about people trapped on a boat), it's clear that a sailing vessel is its own special sort of dystopia. The Volunteer, the main ship in [b:The North Water|25666046|The North Water|Ian McGuire|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1456351800s/25666046.jpg|45489184], is an isolated world of violence, rape, betrayal, where the "air is dense with the velvet reek of liquid feces." Imagine what the characters experience in Cormac McCarthy's [b:The Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1439197219s/6288.jpg|3355573], then take all that and lock it on a ship in the ice floes of the arctic north, and you'll get an idea of what this book is like.