No Whale of a Time

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.  —Herman Melville, Billy Budd

The science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury once said, “Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a ouija board.” Moby-Dick wasn’t successful when Melville published it in 1851 to mixed reviews. By the time he died in 1891 it had gone out of print. It was rediscovered in the early twentieth century, and became a classic.

Herman Melville felt life on a whaler was a horrible life: “the entire ship stank of whale blubber”. He remarked, “Back when I wrote the book, whaling was really huge and it was in such high demand. It was almost like oil in your generation.” By 1859, energy demand had shifted in the UK. Increasing reliance on paraffin and coal oil had eroded the market for whale oil.

The North Water (2021) is a five-part television series, written and directed by Andrew Haigh, based on a 2016 best-selling novel by the British author Ian McGuire. It is set in the times of the death throes of the British whaling industry.

The story pays homage to Dan Simmons’s The Terror (2018), Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015), Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Melville’s Moby-Dick and even the novels of Charles Dickens.

In 1859, the whaling ship Volunteer, under Captain Arthur Brownlee, is about to depart from the port of Hull, England, for the hunting fields near Greenland. Patrick Sumner, an ex-surgeon from the British Army, is commissioned as ship’s doctor. Sumner had been court-martialled, for greed and dereliction of duty in the Siege of Delhi, during the Indian rebellion against the East India Company in 1857, which has prevented him from working professionally as a doctor. He is also suffering from laudanum addiction. On board Volunteer is a psychopathic harpooner, Henry Drax, who, in the opening episode, ambushes, kills and robs the patron of a local pub who refuses to buy him drinks. Whaling magnate Baxter, Brownlee and ship’s mate Michael Cavendish collaborate on a plan to sink the Volunteer in northern waters, to collect the £12,000 insurance money. A second ship, Hastings, also owned by Baxter, is instructed to follow nearby in order to rescue the men. 

While at sea, a cabin boy named Joseph Hannah  visits Sumner with a stomach complaint. The doctor discovers that the boy has been sexually abused on board the ship but Hannah is afraid to name his assailant. The ship’s carpenter, McKendrick, is unjustly accused, due to his reputation of having a sexual preference for men, and Drax, the real culprit, sees an opportunity to set him up as a patsy. However, during the medical examination, Sumner finds no trace on the accused man of the boy’s venereal disease. Sumner concludes that if McKendrick is innocent, Drax is lying. Hannah is later found dead, stuffed inside a water barrel. Examining Drax, Sumner discovers a child’s tooth embedded in an infected bite wound on his shoulder. Exposed, Drax bludgeons Brownlee with a club, breaks Cavendish’s nose and is only stopped from attacking Sumner by another ship’s mate, Black, who intervenes at gunpoint. Drax is manacled and locked up in the hold.

Brownlee succumbs to his wounds and Cavendish takes command of the Volunteer. When the ship becomes pinned in a crushing ice floe, the crew evacuate to the ice. The ship is in no danger of sinking, but Cavendish, with Drax’s help, uses this opportunity to stove in the side of the lower hull, causing the ship to sink. Half of the crew head out over the floe towards the Hastings, which is moored in the distance. But after a stormy night, the rescue ship has disappeared and the men fear it has sunk.

The survivors are struggling on remaining rations and cannot find food. Sumner is also suffering with laudanum withdrawal. Two Inukitut men appear in canoes and Cavendish trades his rifle for a seal. As the weather worsens, the Inukituts prepare to depart. Drax frees himself, killing both Inukituts and Cavendish and makes his escape on the remaining whaleboat. Sumner, while hunting, sights a polar bear but only wounds it, and tracks it for miles. He becomes trapped in a ferocious snowstorm but manages to kill the bear and use its carcass for a shelter. He is discovered unconscious by Inukitut hunters and taken to the remote cabin of a missionary priest, who helps him recover. The Inukituts believe that having overcome the bear he has special powers, and they give him a knife with a carved ivory handle in the shape of a polar bear.

Months later, Sumner is aboard a schooner at sea. He arrives back in Hull during May Day celebrations and goes to Baxter’s office to collect his wages. He still wants to hunt Drax down but Baxter tries to dissuade him—telling him that Drax is either dead or in Canada—and is advised to let the matter go. Baxter is secretly hiding Drax in an upstairs attic and hires him to kill Sumner, who he believes could be dangerous to his enterprises. An ambush is set up in the company warehouse but, after a struggle, Sumner gets the better of Drax, killing him with his bear-handled knife. Sumner returns to Baxter’s office and robs him, aiming his rifle at his head. The scene cuts to the closed office door and a shot is heard, suggesting Sumner has killed Baxter.

Some months later, a fully recovered Sumner, under a different name, dressed in finery, is in Berlin. Visiting a local zoo, he is transfixed by an emaciated polar bear he sees in an enclosure.

The North Water’s director-writer Andrew Haigh was born in 1973 in Harrogate in Yorkshire. Rejected by the UK National Film and Television School, he attended the private Los Angeles Film School. He began in the movie industry as Ismail Merchant’s personal assistant in Merchant Ivory Productions.

Haigh wrote and directed the 2015 film 45 Years, which earned Charlotte Rampling a Best Actress Academy Award nomination. He worked as assistant editor on Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) and Black Hawk Down (2001). There are stylistic similarities between The North Water and Scott’s series about Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to discover the Northwest Passage, The Terror (2018), which I reviewed in Quadrant in September 2019.

But, as Haigh told Miranda Collinge of Esquire, “these are not men trying to find the Northwest Passage. This is a working ship with working-class men. These men are going to kill whales to earn money.” The Terror ends in 1850 and The North Water begins in 1859, so perhaps it could be viewed as some kind of nautical sequel.

Whereas The Terror was filmed entirely on indoor sets, with state-of-the-art CGI effects, The North Water was shot on location in Arctic waters, in the Svalbard archipelago, which is almost two-thirds glacier, 500 miles south of the North Pole, around the 81st parallel. No film crew had ever been so far north before. The crew and actors spent a month on the three-masted Danish schooner Activ.

The television series is based on the 2016 novel of the same title by Ian McGuire, who was born in Hull and received a PhD in nineteenth-century American literature from the University of Virginia. McGuire relied for his research on journals kept by Arctic explorers and surgeons aboard whaling ships. Sumner’s daily note-taking in his own diary was realistic, as doctors were generally more literate than whaling men and had more time to do this kind of journal keeping. McGuire credits McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as his primary influence but The North Water is a much stronger story. I felt Blood Meridian superficial. McGuire’s novel is much more visceral than the series, with evocative smells and tastes much like Patrick Süskind’s Perfume (1985). The North Water was one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of 2016, and long-listed in the same year for the Booker Prize. 

The television series was produced for BBC 2 by See-Saw Films, a British-Australian company, responsible for The King’s Speech (2010), winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. The company’s television series Top of the Lake, directed by Jane Campion, was nominated for eight Emmy awards.

Colin Farrell, who stars, against type, as the ruthless psychopathic harpooner Henry Drax, is an Irish actor who had the lead role of Alexander the Great in Oliver Stone’s film Alexander (2004). He played the father of P.L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, in Saving Mr Banks (2013). The Irish Times listed Farrell last year as one of the five greatest Irish film actors.

Farrell is almost unrecognisable as Drax, physically bulked-up for his role, reminding me of the larger-sized Russell Crowe in some of his more recent menacing roles, like the vicious road-rage character in Unhinged (2020.) Farrell altered his physical appearance to play Drax in true method-acting style, much as Robert De Niro did for his role in Raging Bull (1980). He told Gabriel Tate, of the Irish Times:

I ate a lot and lifted some heavy weights. I looked at Victorian boxers and dockers, trying to get the belly and the muscle. It was not done under the supervision of medical professionals at all and was really ill advised.

In an interview with Lynne Kelleher of the Dublin Independent, Farrell said of the filming:

I did feel that death was just around the corner at any given time. That we were just one mistake away from someone falling into the Arctic Sea and either very quickly getting hypothermia or sinking under the weight of the waterlogged costume they had to wear. 

Daniel Fienberg of the Hollywood Reporter wrote: “Farrell is not, in a general sense, a looming figure, and much of Haigh’s craft is dedicated to creating the illusion that the actor is a hulking brute.” 

Jack O’Connell, who played Sumner, is an English actor born in 1990. He spent his early career playing juvenile delinquents—very realistically, as his own youth was spent in and out of court on alcohol and violence charges. At the age of seventeen, he received a one-year young offender’s referral order. Between his early film roles, he worked as a farmhand in Surrey, which may have saved him from becoming an adult criminal.

He has appeared in episodes of Wire in the Blood and played a psychopathic gang leader in Eden Lake (2008). His first leading role was in the Angelina Jolie-directed Unbroken (2014) where, also in true method-style, he lost thirty pounds to play the ex-prisoner-of-war Louis Zamperini, the Italian-American Olympic long-distance runner. He is a recipient of the BAFTA Rising Star Award.

Each episode of The North Water begins with a distinctive chapter heading: “Behold the Man”, “We Men Are Wretched Things”, “Homo Homini Lupus” (Latin for “A Man is a Wolf to Another Man”), “The Devils of the Earth” and “To Live is to Suffer”. But none of these headings, or the classic Latin quote, appear in McGuire’s novel.

One of the obvious differences between the series and the novel is that the book explores, in language, with an almost forensic frankness, the sexual abuse of the cabin boy, Hannah. I have never read or seen anything in contemporary fiction that describes this almost-taboo subject in the way this novel addresses it. It makes Nabokov’s Lolita seem like something produced by Walt Disney. It is as if we are standing over a coroner while he detachedly performs an autopsy. McGuire says, in an interview with Drew Hunt, in the appendix of the novel:

Writing for me is quite an amoral activity. When I’m working, my interest is primarily focused on producing something which is interesting and that works as a piece of fiction, and I’m much less concerned and probably much less aware of the moral implications of whatever is happening on the page. It’s only afterwards when someone points out how gruesome or disturbing a particular scene or moment is that I really see it from that perspective.

I am certain that no television production today  could accurately portray the shocking images McGuire’s novel presents. The series only touches the surface. For instance, the opening scene of the novel, where Drax murders and then rapes a black boy, is omitted from the series. This sanitisation, to make the story palatable for television audiences, is also apparent in the rewriting of a statement uttered by Captain Brownlee. In the book, on being told that Hannah has been sodomised, he says: “Did you ever hear of such a thing? A little girl is one thing. A little girl I halfway understand. But not a f*** cabin boy, good god, no. It’s evil times we live in.” In the series, this is subtly changed to: “A young girl, I can halfway understand. But a cabin boy?”

In the novel, when Inukitut hunters rescue Sumner from the carcass of the dead bear, he is first taken to their village, not to the missionary’s cabin as in the series. He remains there for the initial stages of his recovery. During the night, while sharing a communal tribal bed, he has sexual relations with the wife of one of the Inukituts. In the morning, this woman does not acknowledge it or make eye contact with him. This peculiar liaison goes on for several nights. Wife sharing, as a gift to strangers in Inukitut culture, was first explored in the film Savage Innocence (1960), with Anthony Quinn, but later this was shown to be an exaggeration. Inukituts were known to share partners amongst their own tribal members, but it was almost unheard of to do this with strangers. When the Inukitut shaman declares that for Sumner to truly heal, he must be returned to his own people, only then do they bring him to the missionary’s cabin. Before he departs their camp, the Inukitut woman says to Sumner, in crude English, “Gud bye.” This entire village sequence was omitted from the series.

In the novel, Sumner doesn’t shoot Baxter in his office but takes him to the warehouse and suspends him by his neck, by a rope from a beam, with only the tips of his toes touching the ground. He tells him that if he doesn’t struggle, he will survive until morning, when he will be discovered. Sumner uses this time to escape on a horse.

In the series it is not clear whether, in fact, Sumner has killed Baxter or not. Sumner points the gun at him and a shot is heard through a closed door, but the rest is left to our imagination. One would imagine that, if we are going by the novel, Sumner would need sufficient time to escape, fearing Baxter would go to the police. This scene is ambiguity for its own sake when it would have been much clearer just to follow the story in the novel.

Nevertheless, the series is remarkably faithful to the book. Helen Dunmore of the Guardian wrote:

These were hard men, in it for the money or driven by pasts they did not disclose. When Herman Melville made his 18-month voyage on the whaler Acushnet, from which he drew so much of the material for Moby-Dick, 26 crew signed up but 11 deserted the expedition … any novel set on a whaler is bound to raise comparisons with Moby-Dick, and McGuire’s characters, caged as they are within their grim destinies, lack the superb elasticity and vitality that make Melville’s most tragic passages shine … [McGuire] pays tribute to Melville with a series of covert allusions to his work. We learn that Drax previously travelled to the Marquesas Islands aboard the Dolly, which was the fictional vessel in Melville’s first novel, Typee.

David Evans of the Independent said:

There are sublime descriptions of Arctic landscapes … McGuire gives us an iceberg, “immense, chimneyed, wind-gouged, sliding eastwards like an albinistic butte unmoored from the desert floor”, and “great right whales lying bunched in pods like leaden storm clouds beneath the silent sheets of ice”. Such fine writing might have been lifted from the pages of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. And indeed, one way of looking at The North Water is as an extended homage to the great maritime novels of the past.

Both McGuire and Haigh suggest a metaphorical archetype in the recurring use of the polar bear, much in the way the white whale was used in Moby-Dick. But it feels artificial here and without depth.

In the book, the first bear we see is killed and skinned in front of its baby cub, and the cub is taken aboard with a view to selling it later. Sumner forms a bond with the cub and becomes very attached to it. Later, the cub escapes back into the wild.

The next time we encounter a polar bear is when Sumner hunts it down, using its dead body for shelter. The Inukituts give Sumner a knife with a carved ivory handle in the shape of a bear. This knife saves Sumner’s life when he later uses it to kill Drax.

The final image of the bear is the emaciated and domesticated one Sumner sees in the Berlin zoo.

But the killing of the mother and taking of her cub, and its affectionate bond with Sumner and subsequent escape, is left out of the series. In the book, by some stretch, we might imagine perhaps the bear in the Berlin zoo might be this same little cub, somehow recaptured and fully grown, but, as these scenes were omitted from the series, obviously Haigh wasn’t interested in pursuing this theme.

In any case, Dan Simmons’s The Terror employs this metaphor much more effectively with the ferocious half-bear, half-man Tuunbaq creature, which is an actual mythological figure in Inukitut spiritual culture.

The true primordial archetype in The North Water is Henry Drax. McGuire says, in his interview with Hunt:

The peculiarity of Drax as a villain is that he’s not really ambitious … he acts instinctually and without much forethought or planning. You could say, in that sense, that he’s as much a monster as a villain—a good comparison might be to Mr Hyde in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde or even to the whale in Moby-Dick.