Daniel Kraus (Simon & Schuster)
US: hardback UK: Ebook; hardback 9 November
COMPARISONS are a reviewer’s best friend. Not sure how to fully describe the impact of a novel? Simply find other titles that contain elements of the story in question and use them to help do the work.
Daniel Kraus’s Whalefall comes especially freighted with ready-made associations. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville is the obvious reference point. After all, Kraus’s novel also focuses on an intimate relationship between man and whale. Intimacy in extremis, in this case, as the bulk of the story is told from within a sperm whale’s stomach, where our 17-year-old protagonist, Jay, has only an hour’s worth of air left in his oxygen tank. Yes, Whalefall is about a man who is swallowed by a whale.
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But an opening epigram aside, neither Melville’s classic nor the Biblical Jonah have any real traction in Whalefall. Closer comparisons could be made to Ernest Hemingway’s novella, The Old Man and the Sea, in which the fish on the end of the line represents both real, physical struggle and allegorical crisis.
Then there is Andy Weir’s The Martian. That novel’s ingenuity-on-the-fly adventures are mirrored in Jay’s desperate attempts to construct an escape plan out of the detritus inside his fleshy cell. Who knew a jellyfish could prove so useful?
In truth, any direct comparison does a disservice to the individuality of Kraus’s novel. It is a sensory epic, both inside and outside the whale. An early section introduces us to Jay (and, importantly, to his rudimentary scuba kit) while he swims out to sea in search of the remains of his father, a local diving legend. An encounter with some gigantic undersea fauna features all the awe and appalling human diminishment common to tales of cosmic horror. Thalassophobes, those who fear deep bodies of water, will find the descriptions of things gliding from hidden depths completely unnerving.
However, once Jay finds himself inadvertently swallowed, Kraus changes aesthetic tack. There is no room for grandeur inside a stomach and Jay’s bodily experience becomes a gauntlet of broken bones, acid burns and blubbery pulverisation.
His mind, however, is a different seascape. Jay’s fractured relationship with Mitt, his troubled, charismatic father, forms Whalefall‘s emotional spine. Jay felt misunderstood by his father, and Mitt’s unforgiving lectures about exploring the ocean drove a wedge between them, left unreconciled by his death.
In the gastric dark, Mitt’s disembodied voice and Jay’s reconsidered memories begin to unpick this narrative. One flashback, in which Mitt teaches his son to control his anxious breathing, proves both life-saving and heartbreakingly poignant. Jay laments that he had lessons rather than love. As the book reveals, the lessons were the love.
Whalefall‘s best trick is the ambiguity of Mitt’s presence. Is he a product of Jay’s hypoxia? A memory? A ghost? Or does he – as the novel seems to want us to believe – exist in some strange liminal state, as the whale?
If it is the last of these, Kraus offers a satisfying, if slightly heavy-handed, metaphor for a boy’s need to escape his father. It also makes sense of the emotional pivot in which both Jay and, I suspect, most readers come to care for the well-being of what is in effect his sentient prison. An orca pod attack is devastating, even if Jay’s perspective reduces it to sound and vibration. It is a blind view of brutal magnificence.
The poetry of the prose aside, Whalefall‘s anatomical rigour supports the story. Kraus’s speculation may be based in theoretical possibility rather than fact, but he exploits both our knowledge of and uncertainty about whale interiors to great effect. Armed with this breadth of research, and a standard of prose that evokes Cormac McCarthy at his most symbolic, Kraus turns the literal guts of this novel into a haunted house, a torture chamber, a church and a uterus for belated rebirth. There is nothing else quite like Whalefall.
Neil McRobert is a writer and podcaster based near Manchester, UK
