Ethan Rutherford's NORTH SUN or THE VOYAGE OF THE WHALESHIP ESTHER

We're told not to judge books by their covers, and to that I mostly hold, but occasionally I must make an exception. When this beauty started staring out at me from A Strange Object/Deep Vellum's web page, I had to bring it into my home. I mean, look at this thing!

And once it's come into your home, this cover's baleful stare, if allowed to peek out from under or from the top of one's stack of recently acquired books to be read (on dead tree despite the pain), will compel one to read it, and soon, if only to find out what the hell this staring creature even is.

Even if the book's possessor is a stubborn old crone-in-training like your humble blogger, feeling tsundoku guilt and determined to read some of the tomes that came here before it. Compelled by this cover, I took it up out of turn. And so here we are, with Ethan Rutherford's debut novel, North Sun or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, in the very year in which it was published.

And yes, there's a whale carcass in the room that I can't ignore, viz, the last book about whaling* I wrote about on this blog, which entry is still one of the most read things I've ever written, I'm pretty sure, my old review of Moby-Dick. Which most people seem to interpret as me roasting Melville's maritime masterpiece but 1. I love an unlikeable protagonist especially if he's an unreliable narrator and 2. The tedium is very much the point of that book and as such i respect Moby-Dick as a pinnacle of creative achievement and 3. I've since read it again, after having fallen in love with China Mieville's Railsea, and found more to admire in it a second time around. I could just take that post down (since I can't just let it sink into oblivion apparently) but I can't bring myself to do so. It's a pole holding up the tent of my identity. I'm the chick who called Ishmael the annoying hipster on the boat.** I own it. 

But anyway, North Sun or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther is a book that, for the first third or so, almost feels like a very streamlined and snappy retelling of the story of the Essex, that unfortunate ship whose fate inspired Moby-Dick and is depicted in In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, book, film and podcast episode.*** And of course, in certain respects, one sea voyage is very like another, at least to start with. The action is briskly told, the periods of inaction elided over, everything described in terse sentences, quick paragraphs and severely truncated chapters that would seem to be the very opposite of Moby-Dick. For a while this feels like it might turn out to be the whole point.

But then [REDACTED] shows up not long after a pair and then a whole pack of [REDACTEDs] attack and on the heels of a second encounter between little [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and the sinister and very large [REDACTED] in the bowels of the ship -- and everything changes. The ship turns north at the Sandwich Islands -- they are not merely on a whaling expedition, but are also off to try to recover a Mr. Leander, captain of another whaling ship, who lost his charge to the pack ice and sent the Esther's eventual captain back to New Bedford, MA to tell the owners of both the Esther and the lost Dromo, that nobody was coming home from the Dromo even though its captain is married to one of the family's daughters -- and heads up to the Arctic to hunt whales, walrus and Leander.

By the time the ship is on its new heading, the reader has realized that they are sailing, not only into chillier, more dangerous waters, but also into the wild waves of Weird Fiction, as I'll get into in a bit.

Ahoy!

On the Esther sails through the choppy winter sea! She swoops her spirit up one wave and down another, proud and vain. Finally, the cold truly catches and the temperature drops. The water turns gray and leaden; every surface of the ship remains damp. The fog smothers and surrounds them. But the silence they sail through is not the absence of sound at all. Rather, it is the presence of all sound. The cold bites the men's skin; they feel it in their teeth. They bundle against it, but that's how it is.

How many chapters would Herman Melville have taken to describe this? I kid. Kind of.

But anyway, the hazards of a whaling voyage are many, even before things get explicitly Weird. For instance, while of course I'm enough of a veteran of maritime fiction to know what a shipworm is (actually a kind of clam, with a long flexible body; they use their little shells as drill bits to bore through the wood of ships) but I've never encountered them depicted as crawling free between locations on deck where little ship's boys could potentially see them. Which, this alone could introduce a note of horror for the squeamish reader -- which I am not. I am a sicko, which is why I decided to share an amusing-to-me image of these strange and destructive critters:

Thank you, Internet. You're still capable of providing some good things.

Oh, and by the way, the worms in the book, have grown to be as big around as your arm

and proportionally as long. You're welcome!

But Rutherford isn't here just to try to gross us out. He's enamored of the imagery the setting affords him, and takes full advantage: 

That morning the men have their first glimpse of clustered ice. What a sight! The northern sun glints off the Frozen expanse - her light is a dancing thing, it plays over the basin and reflects crystals in the air. The ice cakes are like glistening scraps skimmed from the pots. They see no patch of color in front of them. Everything - sky, snow, apparent horizon - is a gradation of brilliant white. Except, of course, for the sea itself, which, in the leads and channels, appears black.

Which is to say that we get some quite beautiful prose in North Sun, but with which the author never gets too carried away. The above passage, like the passage I quoted before, constitutes almost an entire chapter, and soon we are back to the plot, the plot, the plot! This is 21st century fiction for the TikTok audience, or something, lean and hungry and raring to get back to pursuit or butchery or uncanny haunting or...

Weirder things. Things which I'm not going to spoil for you but which chiefly concern the two little Riggs brothers, aged ten and twelve, though they are listed on the manifest as twelve and fourteen because, while whaling families are, as one captain observes early in the novel, monsters, they're not complete monsters. They wouldn't employ child labor or anything, I mean come on! But anyway, these two little boys, being the smallest bodies on the boat, get all the nastiest jobs, like getting lowered into the head cavities of slaughtered whales to collect all the spermaceti (you can't have a whaling story without spermaceti!) and being subject to the unwelcome attentions of the kinds of people who pay unwelcome attentions to powerless little boys (trigger warning, there, though nothing gets too graphic).

But there's also a dude who kind of fills the role of the Bond Company Stooge in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Mr. Thule (great name for a vaguely sinister figure, no?), who stays mostly below decks until they reach the ice but then emerges as a figure of unexpected force and knowledge who may be exercising some kind of weird occult powers on behalf of the ship's owners and who is absolutely unperturbed by the forces of weather, wind, tide, wildlife or the increasingly outlandishly bad luck that has afflicted the ship at least since they rounded Cape Horn, the kind of luck which has their chief harpooneer blowing his hand off in a rare bit of comic relief as he experiments with a new kind of explosive harpoon dart that can kill a whale before the animal can dive below the ice and threaten to drag a whaleboat under with him, as nearly happens soon after they arrive in the Arctic.

And there is another figure aboard about whom I'm not going to write here but who will haunt me for a long time, I think. Oh, Old Sorrel. I might even cut out this paragraph just for mentioning him at all. I don't know yet. If I leave it in, it's just because I decided to tease you, dear readers.

I didn't know how much my life was lacking a combination of Herman Melville and Drew Magary (if you know, you know. Crab) until this book found me, but now I'm craving some more whaling tales. And, fortunately for me, I have at least one more in the teetering TBR stack. And readers, that one rhymes. 

Stay tuned!

*That's not an incidental appearance of the practice in an Aubrey/Maturin novel.

**It is perhaps a mark of that post's relative antiquity that I felt the need exhaustively to define what a hipster is.

***Only the latter two have I experienced as of yet, but I have the book on deck for sometime soon. The podcast episode, by the way, is a mini-series by the guys at Last Podcast on the Left.