Rebecca Giggs, _Fathoms: The World in the Whale_

I'M STILL DRAWING on the momentum I picked up from Sheldrake's amazing Entangled Life and so picked up this prize-winning debut from Australian writer Rebecca Giggs. Fathoms abounds in astonishing information about what whales, not least dead ones, contribute to the eco-system of the oceans (especially the deepest parts of it), about their vocalizations, about how humans have hunted and consumed them (as fuel, as food), about how humans have become fascinated by them and decided to try to protect them, about how the trash we dump in the ocean may be doing whales even more harm than our hunting of them did.

Giggs's style is energetic. "A whale warrants pause--be it for amazement or for mourning" is a sentence that arrested me in the early going (p. 17), and then there was the carnival of imagery Giggs gives us in describing marine life in the deepest of depths : "It [a dead whale sinking to ocean's bottom] drifts past fish that no longer look like anything we might call fish but resemble instead bottled fireworks, reticulated rigging, and musical instruments turned inside out" (19). By the middle of the book, I found myself wishing she would occasionally dial the lyricism back a notch; I like rich prose, but the cholesterol count was getting high at times. I'd certainly be interested in what she does next, nonetheless.

Speaking of recent lyrical expositions on whales, I wonder if Giggs knows Bathsheba Demuth? Demuth's "On Mistaking Whales" in Granta 157 seems to be coming from a perspective not unlike that of Giggs.