Soon we meet McGuire’s protagonist, a disgraced, drug-addicted Irish surgeon named Patrick Sumner. He is a man with no moral compass, one who sees breathing and killing as equal functions of the human body. A harpooner on furlough, he murders a man with a brick to the head and then proceeds to rape and kill a young boy. McGuire begins the book by introducing us to his villain, Henry Drax. In his vividly descriptive prose, writing crafted with the same precision of an ornate jewelry box, McGuire finds a way for the stench and awfulness of his milieu to leap from the page to create a horrifying experience for all the senses. His vision of the 19th century is a bleak one it’s a world where men exist on a day-to-day basis, surviving as if the future is limited, at best. Although many critics have compared McGuire’s vision to the work of Cormac McCarthy, The North Water takes place not in the arid expanse of the American West, but in the icy isolation of the Arctic Sea. That is if you believe The North Water, Ian McGuire’s novel about a whaling voyage gone awry. The past is a filthy place, one of murderous men who care not for the value of human life.
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