Review: The North Water

The North Water by Ian McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is truly disgusting. I understand that work on a whaling ship was not clean or appetizing or lemon-scented. I also understand that by means of the revolting passages we are reminded that life on an 18th century Arctic whaler was about as far from the luxuries of civilization as one could get. (Unless, of course, something were to happen to one's ship...)
That being said, some passages were so riotously revolting that I couldn't take it seriously. It's the grossest book I've ever read, and it was an act of titanic restraint not to read aloud while my friends were eating.

On thirst:

"The deep cavity that remains [in the dead bear] is half-filled with a steaming pool of hot black liquid--blood, urine, bile. Sumner leans forward and starts to drink it, ladling it up quickly into his open mouth with both hands."

On incontinence:

"He stops, groans, then leans over and vomits out gobbets of half-digested seal meat onto the frozen snow beneath. He feels a sharp pain like a lance jabbing in his stomach and releases and involuntary squirt of shit into his trousers. [...] The sweat is frozen on his brow, and his beard is hard now with saliva and bile and fragments of tooth-ground meat."

On scavenging the blubber from a decomposing, bloated whale corpse:

"The blocks of blubber they slice and peel away are miscolored and gelatinous--much more brown than pink. Swung up onto the deck, they drip not blood, as usual, but some foul straw-colored coagulation like the unspeakable rectal oozings of a human corpse."

All that being said, there's a ripping yarn in here too. McGuire does an amazing job of bringing this salty, frigid world vividly to life. The elemental forces lend it an air of fable, as dark forces play out on these poor saps. If you can swallow these passages, there isn't much worse in there--and there's a whole lot better. Best read on an empty stomach!

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