Here is a passage from Ian McGuire’s 2016 novel, The North Water:
Sumner, watching [the whale hunt] from above, feels a brief thrill of victory, a sense of sudden, shared advantage … He feels again, and almost against his will this time, that he is part of something larger and more powerful than himself.
And here is the equivalent moment in the limited series of the same name, now available in its entirety on AMC+:
[…]
[Sumner watches silently from the gunwale.]
[…]
Followed to its logical conclusion, this observation would, of course, put a lamentable end to the art of literary adaptation. Nevertheless, it really is the case that something is lost when one transports a psychological novel from page to screen.
The missing “something” in this instance is an intriguing complexity at the heart of Patrick Sumner, a disgraced army surgeon who joins a whaling expedition in 1859 Yorkshire. As rendered in McGuire’s book, Sumner is tense, diffident. Examining a slain cabin boy, he “[feels] a degree of reluctance and shame” and wonders what, exactly, his shipmates expect of him. Elsewhere, surprised to discover ambition in a younger crewman, he can’t quite swallow his amazement that such a person should have hopes and dreams of his own.
As played on the small screen by Jack O’Connell (This is England, Godless), Sumner is at once a blander character and a more likable one. A man of principled uprightness despite a long-standing laudanum addiction, the doctor towers over his fellows like Bishop Myriel over a pre-redemption Jean Valjean. One could argue, coming to the series’s end, that The North Water has been a chronicle of Sumner’s moral dissolution, but this, even if true, is a late-breaking development. Staid, conscientious, and kindly, Sumner exists for most of the show to counterbalance a villain who is among the most malignant creations in recent literary or television history.
That scoundrel, played with gusto by a bloated Colin Farrell, is harpooner Henry Drax, an earthly devil for whom rape and murder are but instinctive responses to passing events. (“I do as I must,” Drax tells a crewmate. “There ain’t a great deal of cogitation involved.”) Whereas Sumner is a slave to conscience, unable to rest until misdeeds are identified and punished, Drax is a kind of reactive genius, a man whose willingness to maim and kill is bound only by the exigencies of self-interest. The vessel on which the two men play out their dance, the Volunteer, is, consequently, a proving ground as well as the site of multiple crimes. Watching The North Water, one gets the sense that writer-director Andrew Haigh means to test not only McGuire’s characters but the relative merits of good and evil in the abstract.
The context in which this trial unfolds is a fraudulent excursion to Arctic waters, where Captain Arthur Brownlee (Stephen Graham) intends to sink the Volunteer on the orders of his newly insured employer. Among those who are wise to the plan is First Mate Michael Cavendish (Sam Spruell), a conniver par excellence who serves as Drax’s abettor and dupe. Persisting in woeful ignorance are lesser crewmen Otto (Roland Moller) and Jones (Kieran Urquhart), along with a holdful of swabbies whom Haigh manages, with some skill, to distinguish from one another. Elevating the show’s maritime scenes is a commitment to realism that encompasses both the beauty of the northern wilds and the brutality of the men who labored there. Having lugged his crew to within 600 miles of the North Pole, Haigh has at his disposal an array of aerial shots that are stunning to behold. Just as effective, however, are the more intimate moments of whale harvesting: the douse of water administered to the smoking harpoon line, the fountain of blood produced by the final lance to the heart.
Given their obvious similarities, The North Water will inevitably draw comparisons to The Terror (2018), AMC’s other saga of Victorian polar distress. While both shows are far above average in quality, it is all but indisputable that the prior series is the better of the two. In part, this is due to a clear-cut disparity in casting. The Terror had two of the finest television actors going in Jared Harris and Tobias Menzies, whereas The North Water makes do with performances that are solid but uninspiring. Yet there is also something to be said for the earlier production’s sense of wonder. Enigmatic and otherworldly, The Terror dwelt in the realm of mysticism as well as mundanity. Haigh’s program, by contrast, is possessed of an unassailable accuracy but rarely rises above its bleak and frozen sea.
If The North Water has a flaw beyond the aforementioned flattening of its protagonist, it is this unremitting sameness of vision, an outlook expressed not only in the show’s plot but in the very titles of its episodes (e.g., “We Men Are Wretched Things”). Not for Haigh do the frigid poles provide an opportunity to “put the footstep of courage into the stirrup of patience,” to borrow a line from Ernest Shackleton. Rather, the icebound wilderness is but one more arena for humanity’s cruelty, disillusionment, and shame.
It is at least possible, one supposes, that the closing moments of The North Water provide a counterpoint to its otherwise austere perspective. Here, too, however, viewers may find themselves rushing to the book to decode what is insufficiently clear onscreen. Might that be hope we see on Sumner’s face as the camera examines it for the last time? Or is it merely what anyone would feel at the end of so long and harrowing a journey: pure, unadulterated exhaustion?
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
