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Friday 5 December 2008

Leviathan or, The Whale

Out of depth

Leviathan or, The Whale, by Philip Hoare

On the beautiful jacket of this book, a whale disappears from view. Its blue flukes are all that are left behind as its body slips away unseen. That tail-only view has become what we know of the whale. It is the picture of our ignorance. We don’t know how long whales live. We don’t really know how many there are. We don’t know where they live. We don’t know what their clicks and creaks mean. Nor what damage the three or four centuries of hunting has done to their social networks, or to their understanding of their oceanic world. We know next to nothing about them. Philip Hoare’s new and voluminous book about them is, in that way, a long exploration of an absence.

That isn’t how it was. Whales used to be to hand. They were known for what they could provide. The so-called Right Whale was called that because it floated conveniently near the surface, didn’t sink when dead and so was the right one to hunt and kill. Whales were the ocean equivalent of forests and mines. Oil, baleen, blubber, meat, gut, and the mysterious compacted faeces called ambergris, worth thousands of pounds an ounce, were all extracted with increasing efficiency until the international moratorium on whaling was imposed in 1987. Ambergris is still at the base of many of the most delicious scents. ‘If you happen to be wearing Dioressence today,’ Hoare says, ‘you are wearing the scent of a sperm whale.’ At parties in London, he can always detect the unmistakable whiff of the whale as he moves between the shoulders of the beautiful, perfumed people.

Much of Leviathan is dedicated to retelling the history of the whaling fleets and their hungry and merciless quarrying of the great resource. It retreads much of the ground already covered in many whaling histories, but it is a more ambitious and less objective book than most. The whale, even to the whalers, was more than money. Perhaps through an act of collective and unconscious transference, the whalers saw whales not as ‘fragile survivors’ — our own whale-tail view — but as ‘wilful daemons’ and that metaphysical vision of the whale was always bound up with the hunt. The spectres of ambition, pain, guilt and revenge course through these pages.

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