Heavy, like a whale

“Fathoms”, by Rebecca Giggs, is an exploration of the past and present of whales, while contextualizing recent human activity and behaviours through the medium of whales. Thus the byline “the world in the whale”.
Fathoms then is not just a book about whales, but about the constant attack on nature by humans, with the state of whales and the changes in attitudes of humans towards them becoming something of a metaphor and trope of man’s constant damage of the environment.
Giggs regards whales as intricately linked to the environmentalist movement, showing how the fight to ban whaling was the first global campaign waged across borders, bringing organisations like Greenpeace into public consciousness, and one which appealed to the sense of wonderment that whales educed.
While whaling is now banned in most parts of the world now, the threats remain persistent, while whale populations diminished dramatically over the past 2 centuries. Industrialisation has led to a high level of chemicals being ingested by whales, with some of the long lasting chemicals such as PCBs still in the seas in spite of being banned by many governments in the Seventies and Eighties. Giggs informs in great detail on the role of these chemicals – and muses at the irony that many of these chemicals and compounds were first created by chemists from gases generated by burning whale oil.
The role of whale oil, whaling and whale meat in “civilisation” is also explained and discussed in detail. The book starts with a history of whaling, and the ubiquitous presence of whale derived products in Europe and America in the 19th century, drawing parallels to the ubiquitousness of plastics today. Whaling also led to widespread “defaunation”, a new (for me) term signifying a state of a massive reduction in numbers, but not quite extermination, of a species and its impact on nearby fauna and related ecosystems. Thus the rise of industrial scale whaling was accompanied by a concomitant decrease in the numbers of all kinds of sea animals which were often hunted as meat for those on the whaling ships themselves.
Some of the writing is quite direct and discomforting - indeed right from the start, as the prologue describes the author lining up at to see a beached whale as it slowly dies. The elaborate description of what the whale is likely going through can be disturbing - as its body, meant to conserve heat in cold waters, becomes like a boiler on land and the whale basically goes slowly, heating to death.
Giggs knows her subject, and writes with feeling and pathos. And she keeps pulling out facts about whales that are quite amazing. For example, when whales die at sea, a whole ecosystem comes alive and thrives, living on, in and under the carcass, while feeding on it as it sinks to the seafloor.
But sometimes the detail is too much, and too abstruse, and after a while, I found it tiring. Perhaps the intensity and intricate construction of the prose itself is largely to blame for the weariness as much as the underlying sense of tragedy. The writing and the language felt heavy, a bit overly lyrical and frankly not much of a pleasure to read.
If you don’t tire the way I did, then there is a lot to read here about whales and wonder.

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