Leviathan or, The Whale
by Philip Hoare
Summary
Philip Hoare has been afraid of deep water all his life and obsessed with whales almost as long, and this book is the working out of that double fact: part natural history, part cultural history, part memoir, part pilgrimage, all of it organised around Moby-Dick, the book Hoare rereads the way believers reread scripture.
The chapters move the way an obsession moves. The boy at the Natural History Museum under the blue whale model; the suburban childhood in Southampton, a port city with the sea always at the end of the road; Melville's own life and the strange, failed publication of his masterpiece; the industrial history of whaling, New Bedford and Nantucket, the sperm whale rendered into lamplight and corset stays, Britain's own forgotten whaling ports; the twentieth century's mechanised slaughter, which killed more whales than all previous centuries together; and the science, sperm whale brains, clicks and dives, the profound unknowability of an animal that carries the largest mind on earth into darkness a mile down. Threaded through is Hoare himself, swimming at last, in the book's culminating scenes, with the animals he has spent a lifetime reading about.
The prose is incantatory and personal, closer to Sebald than to standard nature writing, with archival photographs drifting through the text, and the learning is carried so lightly that the reader arrives at the science, the history and the literary criticism without noticing the joins.
Around four hundred and fifty pages.
Best for readers who want the whale as subject and mirror at once, and the book that made obsession itself the method of British nature writing.
Historical Context & Significance
Leviathan or, The Whale won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2009, the judges saying that what set it apart was precisely the lifelong passion and the skill in making readers share it. The win marked a shift in the prize's range: after histories and reportage, a work of interior, essayistic nature writing, and the wave of British books that followed, hybrids of memoir, place and species, broke through the door it opened; H Is for Hawk's win five years later completed the arc.
Hoare, previously a biographer of Noël Coward and Stephen Tennant, rebuilt his career around the sea: The Sea Inside and RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR followed, along with a devotion to daily year round swimming that interviewers treat as part of the bibliography.
In America the book appeared as The Whale and won readers on the strength of its Melville chapters, which stand among the best introductions to Moby-Dick ever written, criticism conducted as love.