The North Water

Poop, or pulp? Feces, or gore? WHICH, dear reader, is the most abundant material in this book?! I think I vote poop. Rotting flesh is a close third.

So this is a madcap (!) romp (!!) through a doomed whaling expedition to the north-ish pole. Aboard our steam/sail/whatever-ship are various disgusting, fecal-smelling, blood-covered ogres and gargoyles - just imagine the very worst of humanity, and then dial it like way down? Up? Anyway, everyone is quite terrible. The novel KIND OF has a hero - Patrick Sumner, a traumatized, opium-addicted veteran of the Siege of Delhi, and (my favorite trope) a frontier doctor. The novel DEFINITELY has a villain, or, like, 3? 4? But the most eye-wateringly evil is Henry Drax, an absolute sociopath and moral vacuum.

Is it weird to say this novel is charming? Because it is?! There's a kind of black (frostbitten...) comedy to it all. They are really awful people. And terrible things happen to them. Even the good things that happen to them are... well, terrible. Like when they find that floating corpse of a half-eaten, rotting whale. Yay, more blubber??!! Ooh, it's all gooey and smells bad. (This author LOVES describing the awful smells and textures of putrefying tissue.)

Economics - and money-making - are important motivators in this. From Sumner's (brief) Delhi flashbacks, to Drax's machinations. Insurance fraud makes a cameo. It's like... a whole thing. Nasty, brutish, and short - and capitalist!

Also also: GREAT book for beefing up your SAT word count. Thank God I read this on my Kobo and thus could long press on words like “gallimaufry”. Also, clearly the author has a mixtape of 19th century sea shanties in mind, because the characters - when they're not shitting themselves, impaling each other, vomiting, drinking, or swearing - are often charmingly whistling some obscure 19th century pop tune.