
Before reading this book, I spent about a month reading nothing but novels written by women in the first half of the twentieth century. Most of them were mystery novels. Ninety per cent of the action took place in drawing rooms. The ritual of tea was interrupted for no possible emergency. There were some dead bodies scattered about, but the more serious problem was the difficulty of getting decent servants. It was heaven.
My poor, fragile brain was not prepared for The North Water.
The very first sentence is, “Behold the man,” followed by a paragraph break. In the second paragraph, The Man readjusts his crotch. Before the first chapter is out, he has committed assault, rape, and murder.
Believe it or not, that first chapter is civilised compared to the bulk of the book, for the simple reason that it takes place in a town, with laws and moral judgment and concerned bystanders. Before long, the action moves to a whaling ship headed for the Arctic Circle, with The Man (aka Henry Drax) on board. Nefarious plots are afoot between the captain and the ship’s owner, hinted at before they set sail. Also aboard is the protagonist, a former Army surgeon, returned from India where he has witnessed gruesome horrors at the Siege of Delhi.
Not only is it all a long way away from any imaginable drawing room, there are almost no women in the novel at all, and certainly none whose character contains more detail than a thumbnail sketch. Those that are included are either prostitutes, or members of Arctic tribal groups with little or no English who are not, therefore, given a speaking role (or any other personal characteristics). The whole thing oozes performative masculinity. It’s a belching, farting, shooting, punching, muscle-flexing, rum-drinking, carcass-flensing cruise through a hostile landscape with absolutely nothing to recommend itself to me.
Look, I understand there weren’t actually women on board 19th century whaling vessels. That’s not my complaint. As an adventure story, its bones are actually pretty great, though grim, and it trots along at a decent pace and without too much nautical jargon. But I’ve got to a point in my life where the only possible reaction to so much boozy, sweaty, overt manliness is an eye-roll. I’m just not interested. To make things worse, there’s not a single character in the whole novel whose fate I cared about. They are all, to a man, terrible people who deserve to be stranded off the coast of Greenland. For all it mattered to me, they could have drowned or starved or frozen to death or been mauled by polar bears, and my gaze would not have flickered (except away from the unnecessarily overdescriptive gory detail that would inevitably have been included). It’s not objectively bad, but it is not for me.
Trigger warnings: rape, paedophilia, combat scenes, drug abuse.