Whalefall
Daniel Kraus
Atria Books
Fiction, Sci-Fi/Thriller
Themes: Cross-Genre, Ghosts and Spirits, New Age, Religious and Spirital Themes, Seafaring Tales, Water Monsters, Weirdness
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Description
Seventeen-year-old Jim Gardiner grew up in the shadow of professional scuba diver Mitt Gardiner, a man whose rage,
expectations, and disappointment smothered the boy and drove him to run away from home at fifteen... which is why Jim
wasn't there when Mitt, after a terminal cancer diagnosis, dropped himself into the waters off California's deadly
Monastery Beach with diving weights in his pockets and no air. The suicide and bodyless funeral left Jim full of
churning emotions and unresolved anger, a cloud that he can't seem to escape from, not helped by how his mother and
sisters (and the rest of California's diving community) now see him: the coward, the failure, the kid too selfish to
even visit his locally-famous father in the hospital.
Now, Jim stands on the shores of Monastery Beach, in diving gear for the first time in two years, about to brave
the waters where his father died. If he can recover the bones, give his family something tangible to bury and mourn,
maybe he can redeem himself in their eyes (and his own), prove that he isn't the waste of oxygen that Mitt so often
made him feel like he was. But the ocean is a tricky place, even moreso to a rusty diver with a preoccupied mind. A
series of mistakes and accidents, one too many boundaries pushed, and he finds himself drug into the first stomach of
a massive sperm whale - and haunted by the ghostly voice of his father, who may be a hallucination or may be his only
guide to survival.
Review
I've heard a fair bit of buzz about this one, and the concept looked unique, so when it popped up as available via
Libby I decided it was worth a listen. Unfortunately, despite the admittedly-unique concept and some very visceral
imagery, the story turns into a plodding, overlong gaze into the abyss of one self-absorbed boy's navel.
Jim starts (and for quite some time remains) a young man scarred by a father who never really wanted to be a father,
particularly to a boy like Jim, a sensitive kid prone to crying and who just can't seem to grasp Mitt's worldview or
care about the wisdom he clumsily tries to pass on. Mitt could rarely hold onto a job for long, too outspoken and
generally poor at people skills, growing increasingly reckless as life in the suburbs ground against his inherent free
spirit, throwback nature. One starts to wonder why he married at all, and whether he realized he had daughters, too;
there is no indication that he made any effort to pass on his homespun diving wisdom and experience to either of them
(or to his wife), just that only a boy was worthy of inheriting his true passion... and that Jim, by not also being a
hotheaded throwback acting out his anger at random intervals, was one disappointment too many. For Jim's part, he
spent his childhood alternately coddled by his mother and yelled at by his father, the moments of true father-son
bonding few and far between and only getting fewer and further between as he reached adolescence. Still, Mom and his
sisters are too oblivious in their femininity to see how Mitt is traipsing right up to the emotional abuse border and
stepping over it more than once, taking out his frustrations at being trapped in a life he comes to resent on the boy
(if not consciously), and thus can't possibly comprehend it when the last straw finally breaks him and Jim runs away
from home to a friend's house; they keep trying to drag Jim back into the home that crushed him. Soft, motherly women
never will comprehend Real Men (TM), is the unsubtle message here. It takes some time, and being literally trapped in
the belly of a whale (hands up, anyone surprised by how this story takes a turn into the religious and spiritual
weeds at the earliest opportunity), for Jim to reflect and realize he wasn't entirely blameless for the rift in the
relationship, at least when he was older and had a little more autonomy. Through flashbacks, the horrible pressures
that Mitt's mercurial moods and overbearing personality subjected Jim to are revealed, the forces that shaped and
twisted the boy into the angry, confused young man who plunges into Monastery Beach without a diving partner or much
of a plan, save a driving need to seek Mitt's remains and, with them, a sense of closure that eludes him.
As mentioned earlier, the story itself is plodding, full of sensory details and technical diving terminology while
turning almost everything into some sort of reflection or metaphor of Jim's inner confusion and directionless rage.
It takes some time to actually get to the whale, though the horror of that incident, and the time spent trapped in
the whale, almost become numbing at some point; even in a life-or-death situation, Jim just won't listen and often
does the stupidest thing... though the ghost-voice of Mitt could also spit things out a little more clearly, given
the dire circumstances. From there, things degenerate into lessons on spirituality, the nature of life and death
and birth and rebirth, the meaning of the universe in a speck of dust, and so on and so forth, often repeated in
various forms to make sure the reader Gets It and sees the Profound Meaning the author is driving at with the
subtlety of a charging sperm whale. The climax drags out to excruciating lengths (seriously, if you have trigger
issues about claustrophobia or bodily injury and mutilation, this is not the story for you), and the conclusion is
in no hurry to conclude. It darned near lost another half-star by then. That said, there are moments of profundity
and glimmers of beauty and wonder now and again. It's clear the author has a deep love for the ocean and diving
and the wonders beneath the waves. It was just far too slow, too gory, and too steeped in heavy-handed
spirituality for me to really enjoy it.