The Whale

"This is a wonderful book. It is about the whale, and everything about the whale – its history, its myth and its science. Whales are huge and compelling, and Philip Hoare’s excitement about them comes through. It is also a very handsome book and very nicely illustrated. Everyone talks about what the future of books will be because of electronics, and I have this theory that the future of books is beautiful books. Books that you would want to look at and touch and own. This is that sort of book. We learn a lot about their lives but we also learn about the lore of whales – why they have always been important to us, and what throughout history has been thought about them. The crowning example is Moby Dick , which inspired Hoare to write his book. Moby Dick was in many ways about a mythological version of whales. As Melville intended, it tells us more about us than it does about the whale. It’s about hysteria really – concepts of evil and our hysterical reactions to them. Whales are the largest animal, as far as we know, to have ever been on earth, which is itself fascinating. They’re just so huge. They communicate, I shouldn’t say verbally but auditorily, through sound. We don’t really know what these sounds are. Maybe they are words. But it’s clear that they make sounds and the sounds are communications, telling other whales information. Yes. I think in many ways his style is similar to mine, because he comes at things in so many different ways. I may have influenced him, I don’t know! I get sent books all the time that I am supposed to like because they are sort of like my books. But this one I actually did like. He covers so many different fields. It has a sense of science, but also of literature."