3 Stars
This is
another book from the 2016 Man Booker longlist.
Unfortunately, it turned out not to be my type of book.
It is 1859
and the owner of the whaling ship Volunteer
is putting together a crew. Amongst that
crew is Henry Drax, a harpooner who within the opening pages shows himself to
be a murderer. Also aboard is Patrick
Sumner, a decent but weak man addicted to opium who serves as ship’s doctor. The rest of the crew members are a rather
unpleasant lot, and the trip soon becomes nightmarish with violence being
routine. And, as expected in the Arctic
setting, there is soon a struggle for survival.
The main
conflicts are good versus evil and man versus nature. The cruelty of nature is matched, if not
surpassed, by the savagery of the men. The
book immediately calls to mind Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, but there are also echoes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Because of its blood and violence, it is
reminiscent of a Cormac McCarthy novel.
It is the
character of Henry Drax that is most memorable.
He is totally amoral. He is
described as a man with “fierce and sullen appetites.” He is not burdened by his past, unlike
Sumner, and he also “has no fear of the future, no sense of its power or
meaning.” He is motivated entirely by
his compulsions; in a conversation with Sumner, Drax says, “’I’m a doer, not a
thinker, me. I follow my inclination.’” Lying comes naturally to him: “Words are just noises in a certain order,
and he can use them any way he wishes.
Pigs grunt, ducks quack, and men tell lies.” When he kills a polar bear, “Drax feels
pleasure at this work, arousal, a craftsman’s sense of pride. Death, he believes, is a kind of making, a
kind of building up. What was one thing,
he thinks, is become something else.” When
asked about good and evil, he replies, “’Them’s just words’” and “’The law is
just a name they give to what a certain kind of men prefer.’”
But the
novel is one of action, not one of character.
And there is definitely a lot of action, most of it very violent: seals and whales are slaughtered, boys are
sexually assaulted, a man’s arm is ripped away by a bear, men’s brains are
bashed in. This book is not for the
faint-hearted because blood and gore abound.
The descriptions are very graphic:
“The air is filled with a fetid blast of butchery and excrement” and
“The top portion of the Shetlander’s skull detaches and flies backwards against
the steeply pitched canvas roof, leaving a broad red bull’s-eye and, around it,
a fainter aureole of purplish brain matter” and “the back of Price’s head
explodes in a brief carnation of blood and bone” and “The blocks of blubber
they slice and peel away are miscolored and gelatinous – much more brown than
pink. Swung up onto the deck, they drip
not blood, as usual, but some foul straw-colored coagulation like the
unspeakable rectal oozings of a human corpse” and “As soon as he pierces the
cavity wall, a pint or more of foul and flocculent pus, turbid and pinkish
gray, squirts unhindered . . . The discharge is fibrinous, bloody, and thick as
Cornish cream; it pulses out from the narrow opening like the last twitching
apogee of a monstrous ejaculation.”
This is a novel about death, violence, betrayal,
and depravity, all depicted in gruesome detail.
With its focus on man and nature’s destructiveness, it is not
uplifting. I will be truly surprised it
this title makes it on the Man Booker shortlist.
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