The North Water by Ian Mcguire *** (of 4)

 

The Volunteer was one of the last sailing whalers to take off from Hull, England for the icy seas around Greenland. So many whales had already been killed that paraffin and coal were already less expensive than whale oil and though Captain Brownlee had already lost one ship to ice floes, he commanded another, and secured insurance for it. The kind of men that sign up to sail ships between icebergs and sheet ice, face north Atlantic storms and blizzards vicious enough to coat rigging with enough ice to topple a boat are hardened to the point of violent indifference. 

As the ship drives north, Mcguire's descriptions of the inexorable, silent encroachment of towering icebergs, the squeal and roar of gales, the grinding of ice floes driven by wind into pancakes of shattering and exploding shelves, and the smell of unshowered men that have spent two days and two sunlit nights flensing blubber from the inside of a whale are so realistic that when violence erupts the smell of blood rises from the pages.

The human and animal killings, the weather, and the cold are exceptionally realistic. The plot, maybe not quite as much.