Found this amazing book in a recent book trawl in the Hospice shop. Someone kindly donated this book by Philip Hoare who shares with us his lifelong obsession with the hugely familiar but truthfully unknowable behometh of the seas. Beautifully illustrated with art and photographs and brilliantly written on a quietly compelling subject.Exploring the themes of Moby Dick, the most well known book on the subject of whales and the people who made it their living to bring about their dying, so to speak.Philip Hoare takes us around the world with him. From Nantucket to The Natural History Museum in London, we see what he saw, we hear what he heard. And is genuinely compelling. Its a wonderfully written book which the reader advances through feeling in the company of the author. Gently and humanely observed and not afraid to go deep, so to speak. at times skirting along the surface before taking a poetic deep dive into the history and biology of a species that is just about as alien to the every day as a visitor from another world might be. Its actually a very emotionally written book the heart of which is as deep and at times unfathomable as the great oceans that cover the surface of the world we call home.
Where in ones book collection do you put a book like this? It non-fiction to be sure but it is so artfully crafted that it comes across at times almost dreamlike, a record owing much to REM, what goes on out of sight beneath the here and now and the was and when.So much, if not all, of these creatures lives takes place beneath the waterline, in worlds we can only see in dreams, the seas beneath the surface where mysteries abound. Conclusions about their unseen lives are guessed at, using scant observations about enviroments almost Lovecraftian. And perhaps for me this where the tremendous pull of this book came from.
As the reader visualises these giants moving through depths that would crush bone with the grace of bull angels.This world we share which was all theirs long before it was ours.
A big chunk of this book is taken up with the writing of Moby Dick,chronocling not just the strange and meandering path Herbert Mellville took in order to br ready to create the book that would make him one of the best rememberedof American writers. In a time when that nation, the US of A was young enough to be thought off a newish world. It is a strange book to be sure, more of a cuirates Ork egg than your average strange bird. He took some unusual detours along the way, almost Promethean by todays standards of self invention. If the world is what we make it then Herbert Mellville made it a strange one. Quite beautiful at times, quite harrowing at others. There are elemts of erotocism at play beneath and within the text, more pan sexual than home-erotic although there are obvious men at play scenarios amidst all the squalor of life at sea. Twas not a life for the faint hearted, considering most of those who made the sea their life could not infact swim, making it their almost certain death as much as a livelihood. It seemed it was a fateful encounter with and a sustained friendship with Nathanial Hawthorne that pushed his story of high adventure at sea into more esoteric degrees of storytelling. When the dreamy image of a huge white living thing pushing through uncharted and unfathomable depths could well represent somrthing other than a big fish.
This unexpected find turned out to be one of the most enjoyable and rewarding books I have read in some time. We have shared the planet with these creatures for as long as we have been around. While they were gliding through the darkest corners of the earth hovering up vast amounts of plankton we were doing the same thing to our next door neighbours. Lets hope there is no higher being keeping score of bad behaviour....
