Monday 24 April 2017

The North Water

(April 2017)



Moby Dick—In Space!

Not really. It about whales and whaling though, so the Dick swinging is kind of inevitable, as too is a(nother) call back to The Terror, as the crew of the Volunteer find themselves in ill-equipped in the Arctic ice fields in the mid-19th century, and making increasingly desperate decisions in order to survive. The baddies are painted with slightly too broad a brush to be convincing, but The North Water contains some beautifully spare writing, about a bleak and desolate place populated by bleak and desolate people. I’m not sure it’s a story that needed to be told, but it’s told very well. I also now know the word krang, which is something I’m entirely ambivalent about.


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