AN INTERVIEW WITH Ian McGuire, Author of the North Water

Interviewed by Haley Lawson

Haley Lawson: The North Water takes place in some harsh and extreme environments (a whaling ship, stranded in the artic, etc.). How did in the setting in The North Water impact the plot, characters, and mechanics of the story?

Ian McGuire: I’d say the setting is central to the themes of that novel. It’s based around a journey which takes the characters away from society into an extreme, inhospitable world where they have to confront some of the basic questions of existence. If they’d been in a more comfortable place, it wouldn’t have worked nearly so well. 

Opening lines are something that writers often struggle with. “Behold the man” is a striking opening. Was it inspired by the character Henry Drax? Do you find first lines challenging or something that naturally occurs while you write?

That opening line is quite unusual. It was intended as a tribute to the opening line of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian which is “See the child,” and I also liked that it sounded slightly similar to the beginning of Moby Dick “Call me Ishmael.” Moby Dick and Blood Meridian are probably the two biggest influences on The North Water, so it seemed to make sense to hint at both of them. However, what I didn’t consciously realize at the time (and people sometimes don’t believe me when I say this) is that it also has a much more obvious biblical echo. “Behold the man” is the usual English translation of the Latin ecco homo which is what Pontius Pilate said when he presented Christ to the crowd before he was crucified—a scene depicted many times in paintings. So there are a lot of layers to that opening – more layers than I was consciously aware of when I wrote it. Having said that, I didn’t sweat over it much, I thought of the McCarthy allusion and just went with that. In my other novels, the opening lines are much less complicated!   

Your writing tends to bridge literary fiction with the elements of a thriller. How does genre impact your writing?

I don’t worry too much about genre as I write, but it is always interesting to see how the novels are received and reviewed. Sometimes they’re reviewed as literary fiction, sometimes as historical fiction, sometimes as crime/mystery novels.

Who or what are your literary influences? Why them? How do they affect you?

They change quite a bit over time, and also from book to book, but at moment I’m especially interested in the work of J.M. Coetzee the South African Nobel prize winning novelist. His work has a weight and a moral seriousness which is really rare and admirable, but at the same time it’s witty and ironic and not at all preachy. Some writers can influence you very directly in terms of their prose style, but that’s not the case with Coetzee – with him its more a question of  themes and elements of character and plot.

What is the best piece of writerly advice that you’ve been given?

It’s a piece of advice that other people may not find useful at all, but someone once told me that “thinking is work too,” meaning that just because you’re not actually putting words onto paper you’re not just wasting your time. I find it helpful because I think quite a few of the problems you encounter when writing a novel can be solved by sitting in a chair with a notebook trying to decide what should happen and why. Other problems can only be solved by actually writing and seeing what works and doesn’t, but thinking is still an underestimated element of novel writing I would say.

Does your writing process change with each project? For example, how did writing The North Water compare to writing The Abstainer?

It doesn’t change very much. The North Water and The Abstainer are both historical novels, so I had to begin with a period of research before I could start any writing, and I also had to go back again, to read more sources and check things, as I went along. I probably felt a little bit more sure of myself while writing The Abstainer because The North Water had been successful, but that didn’t make it any easier to write.

How is your writing informed by place and the natural environment?

For me the story always comes first, so I go (imaginatively at least) wherever it takes me whether that’s the Arctic, as in The North Water, or nineteenth-century Manchester, as in The Abstainer. I suppose some other writers might be so strongly affected by a particular place or setting that a story arises from that connection – but so far that’s never happened for me. 

How does it feel to have the BBC make an adaptation of The North Water?

It was exciting and fun. I was very lucky to have Andrew Haigh as the writer and director. He’s excellent, so I know from the beginning it was in good hands. 

What’s next for you? What are you working on now, and what can we anticipate in the future?

I’m currently working on a novel that’s set in northern Canada in the eighteenth century. It’s an adventure story, you could say. If all goes very well it might be published next year. After that, I think I’m going to write something set in the twentieth century – in my own lifetime – which will make a nice change.  

If you were venturing into the wilderness (alone) for a month, what three books would you take with you and why?

War and Peace because it’s both brilliant and long enough to last most of a month (and its been a long time since I read it).

Rilke’s Selected Poems (translated by Stephen Batchelor). I’ve been coming back to Rilke’s poems for a long time and I never get tired of them.  

A new novel by a writer I haven’t read before – because it’s always good to keep up with what’s going on in the present moment, and if you stumble upon an unexpected treasure that’s really exciting. 

Ian McGuire is an English author and academic. He received his PhD from the University of Virginia, where he specialized in nineteenth-century American Literature. Currently, he is a Senior Lecturer with the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. Ian's second novel, The North Water, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016. His most recent work, The Abstainer, was published in 2020.

Haley Lawson is an American writer and teacher. She has taught in the U.S.A., Mongolia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. After working and living abroad, she gained a new perspective on her mother tongue and started writing. Her fiction is published in The Manchester Anthology IX and The Centre for New Writing Zine. She graduated in December 2021 with a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester. Haley writes under the pen name H. M. L. Swann.