As the ship sets out on a voyage to the Arctic Circle, some of the other members of the crew are far more villainous, unpleasant, treacherous and unfortunate than any characters created by authors of adventure stories in the 19th century. Friendless now, addicted to opium, he has signed up, since no one else will have him, to become the surgeon on the Volunteer, a whaling ship in the north of England. The Irish surgeon Patrick Sumner became involved in an act of pure, abject, reckless greed during the siege of Delhi in 1857. Ian McGuire’s riveting and darkly brilliant novel “The North Water” also dramatizes a disgraced personality. Jim is a hunted man, moving away, in the narrator Marlow’s account, from his own substance to become a strange shadow that leaves merely clues and hints about his identity or motives. In a note written in 1917 about his novel “Lord Jim,” Joseph Conrad referred to “the acute consciousness of lost honor.” “Lord Jim” deals with the first mate of a ship who, in a moment of crisis, panics and jumps to safety and is later excoriated by an official inquiry so that his very name and presence become anathema to those who care about codes of decency.
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