Ian McGuire

Ian McGuire's "The North Water" is far too good a novel for an amateur reviewer like myself to introduce. For a great introduction I recommend Colm Toibin's review in The New York Times, the first couple of paragraphs of which were enough for me to order the book at my local library.

However, Toibin's review leaves a little room for me to comment on a couple of themes of the book I think he skipped by.

If "The North Water" is about anything it is about the ability of man to seek redemption for his sins. There are moral sins aplenty in the book. There are also what I might call ethnographic sins: what evil do the men of "The Volunteer" -- the ship bearing whalers to the north -- bring to the Inuit, the people of the North.

This is not a minor matter.

For one thing, the whalers clearly despoil the Inuit's traditional hunting grounds.

Whereas the Inuit treat the big game of the north as partners in a game of survival, for the whalers we have a community of killers stripping whales of their blubber for an obsolete fuel in a dying market.

The seal blood consumed by the locals is a sacred beverage. For the whalers it a waste product.

Toibin praises McGuire for keeping the irony from destroying the narrative, but I see rich irony in the reactions of Sumner to the missionary priest who nurses him to health. Sumner rejects the redemption offered by Christ, or at least he consciously rejects it. The missionary believes Sumner's actions speak louder than his words.

The landscape is also virtually devoid of women and any sort of balanced view of the natural kingdom.

This is not a sentimental novel but there is something to be said for the world of animal and spirit and mystery at its extremes.

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