The harsh life and landscape are perfectly reflected in the language, mannerisms and men. It would be fundamentally wrong to set a story on board a nineteenth century whaling ship and make it anything but brutal, coarse and cruel. It sails within a hair’s breadth of the line on innumerable occasions but pulls back just in time. Ian McGuire pitches his second novel ‘The North Water’ absolutely perfectly. Stay with me, I am nudging in the direction of a point! It requires a rare talent to navigate a course excruciatingly close to the edge of anticipation, desire, brutality or pain without tumbling over into the abyss of ‘gone too far’. There are few amongst us who can identify that ‘line’ without crossing it. Crossing the line is a fairly well-debated phrase thought by some to relate to a line drawn in the sand of battle and others to be a ship’s crossing of the equator regardless of origin, its accepted meaning is to go too far. An odd statement, perhaps, with which to start a review but I am hoping you will give me a little latitude. I have always had an interest in the origins of phrases and sayings. His stories have been published in the Chicago Review, Paris Review and elsewhere, and his first novel was Incredible Bodies.
He is a founder and co-director of the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing. Ian McGuire grew up near Hull and studied at the University of Manchester and the University of Virginia, USA.
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