Non-normative Victorians : Ian McGuire's The North Water as a neo-Victorian novel

Abstract

Although its roots go back to the 1960s, neo-Victorian fiction has particularly flourished over the past three decades. Naturally, the emerging genre has undergone some development in terms of its delineation. The original, restrictive definition of this fiction as one reflecting the Victorian narrative style and canonical texts, rendering real-life personalities of that age and its crucial socio-cultural issues, gradually gave way to a broader definition which stresses an alternative, non-normative (re)presentation and (re)vision of the Victorian era and also looks for connections and continuities between the period and the contemporary world. This broadening of the genre's scope opened it up to new, enriching contributions which have helped to fuel its internal dynamism. One such novel is Ian McGuire's The North Water (2016), the story of an ultimate conflict between good and evil on a background of the declining Victorian whaling industry. This paper attempts to show that the novel can be taken as a resourceful example of neo-Victorian fiction as it provides an unorthodox and authentic insight into the undersides of Victorian England in the form of the whalers' milieu, including their coarse speech, manners and values; and also, through the Conradian and Levinasian ethical queries and dilemmas of the main protagonist, the ship's surgeon Patrick Sumner, it effectively and inspiringly addresses concerns that are still topical for present-day readers.