Ian McGuire follows his whalers north again, this time chasing gold
On France Culture's programme Mauvais Genres, the British novelist discusses his new book, set in a 17th-century English colony in the Canadian far north driven to madness by a fragment of gold-bearing rock.
Ian McGuire was interviewed on France Culture's literary podcast Mauvais Genres, broadcast September 12, under the title "L'or du démon : rencontre avec Ian McGuire." The conversation traces the arc of his fiction from the claustrophobic whaling ship of Dans les eaux du Grand Nord to the Irish independence movement of Celui qui sait, and now to a new novel set in an English colony in the Canadian far north during the seventeenth century.
According to the programme's summary, the colony at the centre of the book is thrown into collective madness after the discovery of a fragment of gold-bearing rock. No publisher, release date or further plot detail was given in the source material.
McGuire's earlier novel The North Water, published in France as Dans les eaux du Grand Nord, established his reputation for unsparing accounts of men pushed to extremity in hostile landscapes; Celui qui sait continued that vein with a turn toward Irish history. The new work appears to extend the pattern into a colonial setting shaped by the promise and menace of gold.
Sources
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