The whale that fell victim to a chain saw

Fathoms: The World In The Whale

Rebecca Giggs Scribe £20 ★★★★ ★

Whales are literary beings. From Herman Melville in the 1800s to Philip Hoare today, writers have long documented their obsession with these vast marine mammals.

Their beauty and mystery have provided the perfect imaginative vehicle for human preoccupations, whether that’s loneliness, compassion or environmental concerns. To write about whales now is to interact with all the previous versions that already exist on the page.

The Australian writer Rebecca Giggs had her own pivotal encounter with a humpback whale that became stranded on her local beach in Perth. She joined the crowds of hopeful people trying to push it back into the sea, only for it to get stuck again higher up and die slowly over three days.

Her account of this incident is both sensitive and brutal: she describes the thrill of touching the whale’s skin and feeling its failing heart beat deep inside, but also recounts her stark conversation with the wildlife officer who would eventually have to chainsaw the carcass in half so it could be removed. Free of the emotional hyperbole that sometimes characterises contemporary nature writing, Giggs’s style is all the more impactful for its sparseness.

Whale strandings like the one she observed are happening with greater frequency. Giggs sets out to investigate why this is, curious to know how human activity might be preventing whales from dying natural deaths at sea. Her journey encompasses everything from whale-hunting ships in Japan to Loch Ness monster conspiracy theories in Scotland, with all of the disparate subjects deftly woven together by clipped, polished prose.

Inevitably, pollution and climate change emerge as major themes of this book. Giggs argues that the plastic and toxic chemicals that end up in the sea only emphasise the ongoing and inextricable ties between humans and whales. ‘We live in their wake, as they in ours,’ she concludes.