by Nicole Emanuel

Annie Dillard observed that under the influence of Herman Melville’s pen, a whale becomes “an aesthetic or epistemological probe by means of which the artist analyzes the universe.” The same might be said of the whaleship in Ethan Rutherford’s novel North Sun: or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther. The material and metaphorical heft of the Esther, this nineteenth-century bark-rigged schooner, are how we come to understand the world of Rutherford’s fiction—and, by extension, a means of probing our contemporary world as well.

Rutherford understands that the whaleship-as-literary-probe is a peculiar craft, built for navigating paradox. The Esther sails from flesh-freezing ice to mind-melting sun; the ship is the stage for acts of butchery and messy labor, as well as for scenes of beauty and tender intimacy. Whales are chased, harpooned, and rendered. Men are lost at sea. Boys lose their innocence. The humans aboard the ship encounter dolphins, walruses, seabirds, crabs, and sharks, and the ensuing interspecies interactions are sometimes transcendent, sometimes harrowing, sometimes both.

These episodes form the bulk of the book, and they hang upon the framework of a plot that’s a bit like Heart of Darkness transposed from equator to pole. The novel opens in 1878 New Bedford, where Captain Arnold Lovejoy has returned from an unprofitable whaling voyage. He bears a letter for the Ashleys, a wealthy family who command a fleet of whaling vessels; their fortune was built upon this extractive industry (and possibly upon more occult sources too, as events later in the novel suggest). The Ashley patriarch is displeased that Captain Leander, who dispatched Lovejoy with the letter, has announced his intention to stay with the Ashleys’ most prized ship, which is in danger of being crushed by the ice pack. Lovejoy is to play the Marlowe to Leander’s Kurtz—to seek out the rogue captain and do his best to persuade him to return what the Ashleys feel is rightfully theirs. As the Esther sails ever further from her origin into a world dominated by forces both natural and supernatural, the tenuous hold of the ship’s human crew on their own lives becomes more and more shaky.

Like Moby-Dick and most other maritime literature, North Sun is not especially concerned with linear plot or fixed personae. Sea stories tend to navigate a complex relationship between the expansiveness of the ocean and the claustrophobic confinement of the ship. Time, too, is defamiliarized in a setting where days can be repetitive and monotonous yet are also punctuated by violent tempests. The spatiotemporal strangeness experienced by ocean-going humans has meant that many sea stories, from The Odyssey onward, have used episodic or picaresque forms—and North Sun is no exception. In brief bursts of action, we follow both the internal and external experiences of various characters, most notably Lovejoy, two young brothers who have signed on to their first voyage as ship’s boys, and in a crucial interlude, Sarah Ashley, the daughter who wrestles with moral qualms about her family’s business.

Rutherford subdivides his book deftly, organizing the narrative into three discrete parts that are further broken down into chapters and fragmented still more into even shorter numbered sections; many of these are only a paragraph or two, though some span a few pages. This creates plenty of room for white space in North Sun, which is fitting for a voyage into distant regions unknown. As the arctic explorer George De Long wrote in his journal in 1880, “I frequently think that instead of recording the idle words that express our progress from day to day I might better keep these pages unwritten, leaving a blank properly to represent the utter blank of this Arctic expedition.”

Toward the end of North Sun, Mr. Ashley quotes a passage from Captain William Scoresby’s 1820 account of life as an arctic whaler. Scoresby saw the supposed docility of whales as evidence of God’s love for humanity, since it was what enabled relatively puny people to consume leviathans. Ashley embellishes Scoresby’s justification with an additional observation of his own: “That they cannot speak, nor answer back; it’s in their design. Their suffering is theirs alone. It’s unheard. And to it I offer neither consolation nor embrace.” North Sun itself does not give readers easy consolation. And yet, the suffering in its pages is heard. This applies to the pangs endured by whales and whalemen alike, by shipworms and pigs, by children and captains. The novel insists that there is no such thing as suffering borne by an individual; for better, and for worse, it is always shared. That idea may hold little consolation, but Rutherford’s lilting prose and carefully constructed narrative make North Sun into the kind of book that does in fact feel like the most expansive of embraces.