Leviathan by Philip Hoare (2008)

This is a personal meditation on whales. It stands in the shadow cast by Moby-Dick, quite intentionally. As a fan of that book, it was likely either to fill me with joy, or set my teeth. In the end, it did neither, but landed up much more on the positive side than the negative. A huge amount of territory was covered in Hoare's mosey through the history of whaling and the actualities of whales. Most of it was quite gripping without being, as many of the reviewers would have had it, mesmerising. I am learning to take much of modern criticism's gigantic excitement with certain works with a boathold's worth of salt. But that overdone enthusiasm doesn't take away from what was achieved, which is an often engaging survey of the culture and nature of cetaceans, and their "interactions" with we humans (for that read bloody slaughter and gutting indignities, as well as some more recent, maybe largely ineffectual, appreciation). Hoare has a tendency of style in this which bothers me: I'd call it 'hyperbolism', or the over-egging of phrasing with no additional effect, or without a great deal of true meaning. Here's an example. On page 361 he speaks of being on a boat conducting a whale watch, and talks about being first out for the day: "...We are the pioneers of the day; in our watery tracks the other boats will follow, bearing a mixture of children and parents, lovers and loners, the lost and the found, all looking for something." It's that 'the lost and the found' that bothers me most (but not only). The whole sentence has weighty phrasing with a sense of profundity that actually says not a lot, its wish for poetry over-exposed. This type of thing skitters throughout, an implication toward....emptiness. I wonder whether it's built of extreme enthusiasm, in which case I guess it's understandable to an extent. But if his other works show this tendency too, I hope he can slowly guide himself out of it. His great facility with language is also of course to be celebrated - I would like to read it reined and fact-circumscribed. Two other important things - one is his angrily heartfelt long cataloguing of the endless slaughter and attitude of utilization that humans have had toward whales. And a sense of forlorn hope that they are salvageable as a group of beings on our planet - has their ocean home gone too far toward acidification, and are their genes already too limited through population reduction to be viable for a long period of survival? And an odd fact which spurred a spike of research in me: a whaleship called the Monongahela claimed to have seen and killed a 'sea-serpent' (a gigantic snakelike creature) and retained some specimens of it, only to be lost before they returned home. It has been called a hoax, but I think there might be more to find here. A lot of the objections to the veracity of the story are revealed to be nonsense on examination. Intriguing savours for future investigations.........