Edited by Steve Bamlett, Thursday, 18 Aug 2016, 14:02
Following a 2nd read of this novel, I still want
to predict a winner, although its nearest rival must be Eileen.
The book will have its critics. Born from the germ of a
novel about Herman Melville, as McGuire revealed at the Edinburgh Festival on
15th August, it rigorously pursues a world that is largely male and
concentrates its thematic energy on the many ways in which masculinity expresses
itself in language, myth, social role and projections into religion and
philosophy, conscious and unconscious. Perhaps worse, for its critics, women in
the novel serve merely as a means of reassuring men about themselves, as whores
or communal gifts from one culture (Inuit) to another.
And, underneath all that is a deep and brooding nihilism.
Although, this nihilism represents the marriage of capitalism and the
a-communal self, the latter is sustained by a profound basis in masculinity as
the sole means to individual identity. Hence the key polarity in the novel
between Drax, the murderer with no sense of anything but fulfilling the
momentary need – even before he can articulate it – and Sumner, a man who tries
to sustain a king of social goodness even in the midst of an appetitive
imperial adventure like the Raj or a privatised equivalent of that in the
brutal whale-oil enterprise. Here Baxter sits, the owner of the ship on which
both earlier characters sail to a predestined failure, in order to secure
capital for Baxter to survive the demise of whaling. Dickens did this too in Our Mutual Friend in the character of
Silas Wegg: ‘Scrunch or be scrunched’.
But Dickens faces that anti-human ideology through comedy,
McGuire’s Drax plays it out as the existential equivalent of all there is to
man without bonds to others but only very basic bodily instincts that have no
realisation in cognition or language – only in easing dynamic pressures within
the body. He is Hyde without Jekyll. Hence the reduction of many of the novel’s
events to images of the body and the paroxysms felt at its orifices – in
eating, drinking, defecation, bleeding (or pus letting) through man-made
orifices. There is a surging returning metaphor of ejaculation, where it seems
to do more work than to picture a scene, however violent. As Sumner saves a
priest by radical surgery, the discharge from the latter’s body, ‘pulses out
from the narrow opening like the last twitching apogee of a monstrous
ejaculation.’ (290) That Sumner is a doctor – hooked on laudanum – matters – it
shows the basis of the novel in the body seen both from the outside and from
glimpses within.
Hence the ‘Ecce Homo’
start, here we have a novel literally about ‘beholding the man’. At its heart
is a young polar bear – brutally cut off from its mother (the sustaining female
figure as she hunted down) by men at work and play.
‘”Lower the mother’s body,”
Brownlee calls out, “that is the only way to quiet the beast.”’ (94).
That bear has other type or token identity with others in
the novel. The novel ends with it as an emblem of male ‘loneliness and need’.
Sumner survives by entering into the body of a bear, using
its warmth to sustain life and perhaps the small remnants of other kinds of
emotion sometimes renascent in Sumner – the Indian boy he led to that boy’s
death even though the latter had served him food and drink – a basic trope of
imperialist auto-poeisis. There are other more obvious tropes of masculinity as
self – man as beast or man or as tool (particularly the knife) but there are
also more complex images of attempts or parodies of social communion. In one of
the very two significant passages where humans sustain their own life from
blood is the scene in the Yak hunting community where seal blood warmed in a pan
is passed between the company, Sumner realises that his desire to reject that
offering means more to the Inuit than refusing a food offering. When he does
drink (finding it like oxtail soup), he senses their joy that ‘he has joined
them somehow’.
The way in which humans celebrate communal identity emerge
then from the sharing of food – from the same service of the orifices as does
the radical selfishness of Drax and Baxter. Yet Sumner reflects: ‘It is not a
rite or ritual, …, it is just their way of taking food.’ That word ‘just’ is
doing a lot of work here – it attempts to restrain an image of communal
blood-sharing that at one level is the Communion sought by the Catholic priest
at the end of the novel.
However, it also recalls the very wonderful short Chapter 6
where Brownlee, the captain remembers how on an ill-fated earlier voyage, the
men survived by each bleeding themselves into a shoe and passing that shoe
around as they drink each other’s blood, which they describe as a ‘godsend’.
Is it a communion – perhaps? Brownlee thinks however, that
if another man’s blood gives me life (shades of Renfield in Dracula), then I
might sustain life by eating and drinking myself – this the central myth of
auto-poeisis I see at the centre of the novel’s extreme acts of capital seeking
its own survival:
When he is thirsty, he will drink
his own blood: when he is hungry, he will eat his own flesh> He will grow
enormous from the feasting, he will expand to fill the empty sky.’ (p. 56)
There is too much in this novel to talk about I think – its
Gothic elements make it touch on the borders even of meanings that may be
unconscious to the writer (at least I think he said so at the Edinburgh Book
Festival). I will be ever grateful though not for its philosophical prowess and
psychodynamic depths by for its picture of the oppressed molly-man, the sailor,
McKendrick. In passages replete with the medical examination of orifices for
signs of brutal or diseased entry. The progress towards his victimisation is
plotted precisely and accurate – the outsider used as a means of projecting
fears of one’s own on a scapegoat and thus rescuing a communality based on
illusion. There are too many great passages to explore this – the following is
not the best but it is short:
After a week or so of this, his
identity as a criminal and a pervert is so secure in the minds of the crew it
is hard to believe he was ever truly one of them. They remember him as separate
and strange, and assume that whatever seemed usual about him was only a clever
way of covering up those deeper deviancies.
Thank you, Ian McGuire. I see this novel as greater than
Eileen, although I think the latter maybe likely to win. It should be THIS
NOVEL. It is great.
Steve’s Bookers – Ian McGuire THE NORTH WATER
Following a 2nd read of this novel, I still want to predict a winner, although its nearest rival must be Eileen.
The book will have its critics. Born from the germ of a novel about Herman Melville, as McGuire revealed at the Edinburgh Festival on 15th August, it rigorously pursues a world that is largely male and concentrates its thematic energy on the many ways in which masculinity expresses itself in language, myth, social role and projections into religion and philosophy, conscious and unconscious. Perhaps worse, for its critics, women in the novel serve merely as a means of reassuring men about themselves, as whores or communal gifts from one culture (Inuit) to another.
And, underneath all that is a deep and brooding nihilism. Although, this nihilism represents the marriage of capitalism and the a-communal self, the latter is sustained by a profound basis in masculinity as the sole means to individual identity. Hence the key polarity in the novel between Drax, the murderer with no sense of anything but fulfilling the momentary need – even before he can articulate it – and Sumner, a man who tries to sustain a king of social goodness even in the midst of an appetitive imperial adventure like the Raj or a privatised equivalent of that in the brutal whale-oil enterprise. Here Baxter sits, the owner of the ship on which both earlier characters sail to a predestined failure, in order to secure capital for Baxter to survive the demise of whaling. Dickens did this too in Our Mutual Friend in the character of Silas Wegg: ‘Scrunch or be scrunched’.
But Dickens faces that anti-human ideology through comedy, McGuire’s Drax plays it out as the existential equivalent of all there is to man without bonds to others but only very basic bodily instincts that have no realisation in cognition or language – only in easing dynamic pressures within the body. He is Hyde without Jekyll. Hence the reduction of many of the novel’s events to images of the body and the paroxysms felt at its orifices – in eating, drinking, defecation, bleeding (or pus letting) through man-made orifices. There is a surging returning metaphor of ejaculation, where it seems to do more work than to picture a scene, however violent. As Sumner saves a priest by radical surgery, the discharge from the latter’s body, ‘pulses out from the narrow opening like the last twitching apogee of a monstrous ejaculation.’ (290) That Sumner is a doctor – hooked on laudanum – matters – it shows the basis of the novel in the body seen both from the outside and from glimpses within.
Hence the ‘Ecce Homo’ start, here we have a novel literally about ‘beholding the man’. At its heart is a young polar bear – brutally cut off from its mother (the sustaining female figure as she hunted down) by men at work and play.
‘”Lower the mother’s body,” Brownlee calls out, “that is the only way to quiet the beast.”’ (94).
That bear has other type or token identity with others in the novel. The novel ends with it as an emblem of male ‘loneliness and need’.
Sumner survives by entering into the body of a bear, using its warmth to sustain life and perhaps the small remnants of other kinds of emotion sometimes renascent in Sumner – the Indian boy he led to that boy’s death even though the latter had served him food and drink – a basic trope of imperialist auto-poeisis. There are other more obvious tropes of masculinity as self – man as beast or man or as tool (particularly the knife) but there are also more complex images of attempts or parodies of social communion. In one of the very two significant passages where humans sustain their own life from blood is the scene in the Yak hunting community where seal blood warmed in a pan is passed between the company, Sumner realises that his desire to reject that offering means more to the Inuit than refusing a food offering. When he does drink (finding it like oxtail soup), he senses their joy that ‘he has joined them somehow’.
The way in which humans celebrate communal identity emerge then from the sharing of food – from the same service of the orifices as does the radical selfishness of Drax and Baxter. Yet Sumner reflects: ‘It is not a rite or ritual, …, it is just their way of taking food.’ That word ‘just’ is doing a lot of work here – it attempts to restrain an image of communal blood-sharing that at one level is the Communion sought by the Catholic priest at the end of the novel.
However, it also recalls the very wonderful short Chapter 6 where Brownlee, the captain remembers how on an ill-fated earlier voyage, the men survived by each bleeding themselves into a shoe and passing that shoe around as they drink each other’s blood, which they describe as a ‘godsend’.
Is it a communion – perhaps? Brownlee thinks however, that if another man’s blood gives me life (shades of Renfield in Dracula), then I might sustain life by eating and drinking myself – this the central myth of auto-poeisis I see at the centre of the novel’s extreme acts of capital seeking its own survival:
When he is thirsty, he will drink his own blood: when he is hungry, he will eat his own flesh> He will grow enormous from the feasting, he will expand to fill the empty sky.’ (p. 56)
There is too much in this novel to talk about I think – its Gothic elements make it touch on the borders even of meanings that may be unconscious to the writer (at least I think he said so at the Edinburgh Book Festival). I will be ever grateful though not for its philosophical prowess and psychodynamic depths by for its picture of the oppressed molly-man, the sailor, McKendrick. In passages replete with the medical examination of orifices for signs of brutal or diseased entry. The progress towards his victimisation is plotted precisely and accurate – the outsider used as a means of projecting fears of one’s own on a scapegoat and thus rescuing a communality based on illusion. There are too many great passages to explore this – the following is not the best but it is short:
After a week or so of this, his identity as a criminal and a pervert is so secure in the minds of the crew it is hard to believe he was ever truly one of them. They remember him as separate and strange, and assume that whatever seemed usual about him was only a clever way of covering up those deeper deviancies.
Thank you, Ian McGuire. I see this novel as greater than Eileen, although I think the latter maybe likely to win. It should be THIS NOVEL. It is great.
All the best
Steve