His vision and his story owe a lot to Mr. McGuire is not reveling in such Sweeney Todd splatter effects simply to be sensational rather, he puts them in the service of a Hobbesian view of life as nasty, brutish and short, and plagued by fear and violent death. All of which is served up to us not just with gory visuals, but with sick-making sounds and smells too. These events are described in gruesome detail worthy of a horror movie, as is the slaughter of whales and seals - shot, harpooned, clubbed, gutted and cut into oozing, greasy pieces. And an oarsman’s arm is ripped off by a polar bear. Two Eskimo hunters are killed while they sleep. A sailor is nearly decapitated with a saw blade. One man has his head bashed with a brick, and “there is a fine spray of blood and a noise like a wet stick snapping.” Another is bludgeoned with a piece of whalebone. It is also as epically bloody as a Jacobean drama or a Cormac McCarthy novel. “The North Water,” Ian McGuire’s savage new novel about a 19th-century Arctic whaling expedition, is a great white shark of a book - swift, terrifying, relentless and unstoppable.
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