The North Water - Ian MGuire
Aug. 5th, 2021 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yuuagoI've finished reading The North Water by Ian McGuire.
This novel came on my radar due to the TV adaptation; I haven't watched it myself yet, but the trailer looked interesting. Since it'll be a while before it'll be out on disc, I decided to take a look at the book. It's about a whaling expedition that goes horribly wrong, leaving its crew stranded in the arctic.
This seemed like it'd be right up my alley, but I honestly didn't like it at all.
Too much in the way of rape, murder, racist language, and bodily functions. The main character, Patrick Sumner, seems like the sort that would be my type - a generally likeable surgeon with a murky past - but I feel like his personality didn't have enough spark to get me to care about his fate one way or the other. And one of the other main characters, Henry Drax, is so deeply unpleasant and awful that I found it hard to push through any of the scenes with him in it. Dude makes Cornelius Hickey from The Terror look like a total softy.
In some ways, I'm reluctant to compare this novel to The Terror too much, but they do fall into some similar beats - shipwrecked in the arctic, a leader who dies early on, polar survival or lack thereof, one character more deeply horrible than the rest, minimal survivors. The main difference, for me, was that the characters in The North Water were all incredibly thinly-sketched, and it was difficult to give a damn about any of them at all, even Sumner, who was the focus of the thing. Whereas The Terror... that book sure did have a lot of flaws, but boy was I ever invested in everyone's fate, even if I knew it would all end terribly.
Even when Sumner cut Drax's head off with a saw, I didn't care overmuch! Which probably says something.
I also think that one of the reasons I was put off was the way that The North Water begins - with rape, violence, racial slurs, shit and piss and basically Drax being Drax. It's not that I can't handle it, or that I think people shouldn't write those things, I just... don't particularly like that kind of material. And then more of the same comes later.
And do we really need to know the details of everybody's shit? Geeze.
So, yeah, definitely a poor match for me. I think I'll eventually watch the TV adaptation regardless, because I'm curious as to how they're going to do it and what changes (if any) they'll make, but I'll take my time getting around to it.
This novel came on my radar due to the TV adaptation; I haven't watched it myself yet, but the trailer looked interesting. Since it'll be a while before it'll be out on disc, I decided to take a look at the book. It's about a whaling expedition that goes horribly wrong, leaving its crew stranded in the arctic.
This seemed like it'd be right up my alley, but I honestly didn't like it at all.
Too much in the way of rape, murder, racist language, and bodily functions. The main character, Patrick Sumner, seems like the sort that would be my type - a generally likeable surgeon with a murky past - but I feel like his personality didn't have enough spark to get me to care about his fate one way or the other. And one of the other main characters, Henry Drax, is so deeply unpleasant and awful that I found it hard to push through any of the scenes with him in it. Dude makes Cornelius Hickey from The Terror look like a total softy.
In some ways, I'm reluctant to compare this novel to The Terror too much, but they do fall into some similar beats - shipwrecked in the arctic, a leader who dies early on, polar survival or lack thereof, one character more deeply horrible than the rest, minimal survivors. The main difference, for me, was that the characters in The North Water were all incredibly thinly-sketched, and it was difficult to give a damn about any of them at all, even Sumner, who was the focus of the thing. Whereas The Terror... that book sure did have a lot of flaws, but boy was I ever invested in everyone's fate, even if I knew it would all end terribly.
Even when Sumner cut Drax's head off with a saw, I didn't care overmuch! Which probably says something.
I also think that one of the reasons I was put off was the way that The North Water begins - with rape, violence, racial slurs, shit and piss and basically Drax being Drax. It's not that I can't handle it, or that I think people shouldn't write those things, I just... don't particularly like that kind of material. And then more of the same comes later.
And do we really need to know the details of everybody's shit? Geeze.
So, yeah, definitely a poor match for me. I think I'll eventually watch the TV adaptation regardless, because I'm curious as to how they're going to do it and what changes (if any) they'll make, but I'll take my time getting around to it.
Yuu. Fic writer & book lover. M/Canada.