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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Moby-Dick inspires enthralling look at whales

Reviewed by: Dana Medoro

Posted: 02/6/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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A minke whale's head breaks the surface of the water as it swims in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary off Antarctica.

The Whale

In Search of the Giants of the Sea

Enlarge Image

By Philip Hoare

HarperCollins, 464 pages, $36

This British non-fiction book is a stunning tribute to Herman Melville's classic novel Moby-Dick, but it is also a stand-alone work of art -- a brilliant, ground-breaking and altogether enthralling study of whales and whaling history.

It is, in addition, generously replete with illustrations and sketches of everything cetological, from 19th-century whale fossils and museum exhibits to contemporary photographs and tooth collections.

Renamed for a North American edition, it was first published in England in 2008 as Leviathan or, The Whale -- the original title of Melville's 1851 novel was Moby-Dick; or, The Whale -- and in 2009 Hoare won the illustrious Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.

This book is Hoare's sixth in an oeuvre primarily concerned with literary biography and the 19th century.

Hoare, also a journalist, proves that he knows both the genre and the century well, as he traces not only Melville's footsteps, but also the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass's, through New England's whaling towns in the decade before the Civil War.

These men and these places permit Hoare to see the history of 19th-century whaling and slavery in the same light: as industries cruel and doomed in their "reliance on unsustainable resources, human and cetacean."

This is a lesson for the present too, of course, and Hoare takes us into the geopolitical world of 20th- and 21st-century whaling and to the brink of the species' extinction.

Throughout these chapters, however, he is remarkable in his ability to withhold reproach or vitriol, sustaining instead his warmth for the creatures themselves and his own richly historical vision.

For more than 400 pages, Hoare navigates and organizes oceanic depths of observations about whales. Sustaining a suspenseful pacing of the information, he can open a discussion with, for instance, a scientific anecdote about whale migration patterns and end it with an exploration of legends surrounding sperm whales swallowing people.

The entire book is arranged this way, looping fact and fiction into a profound fascination for what he calls "these charismatic megafauna."

Hoare's central organizing principle, the thing he returns to again and again, is the mystery surrounding the cetacean family to whom Moby-Dick himself belongs, the sperm whale.

In one superlative after another, Hoare addresses the species' enigmatic grandeur: the "biggest brain of any creature ever alive"; the "most complex social structure of any animal other than man"; the "largest sound system of any animal."

In addition, there's something compelling in their remoteness. As Hoare repeatedly reminds us, it is impossible to get a complete picture of these incomparable mammals because they travel so far and dive so deep, deeper than any other whale species.

And, like all whales, they cannot be studied alive outside of their own element.

Toward the end of the book, Hoare's suspenseful pacing increases as he moves into this assertion about sperm whales: "I write about animals I have never seen."

And then he opens the last chapter with a description of diving into the darkness of the Atlantic and approaching "something so huge I could not see it."

It's a brilliant culmination of his commitment both to his passion for these whales and to the philosophical vision of early 20th-century writer Henry Beston, whom he quotes at exactly the midpoint of his study:

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.... They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations."

Dana Medoro is a professor of American literature at the University of Manitoba.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 6, 2010 H8

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