I had a dream the other day.
As is always the case, everything became immediately fuzzy as I drifted into consciousness, but the long and short of it is this: I saved diminutive Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond from the jaws of a marauding killer whale (or more accurately orca. Or whale killer. This animal is a dolphin, after all).
Whatever late-night TV-watching prompted me to envisage Hammond as the subject of my heroics, and whatever subconscious cowardice made the rescue so exhilaratingly 'not me', obviously it was the whale that stayed with me as my eyes opened on another not-so-eventful day as a Nottingham postgrad. The creature was beautiful. And ferocious. And BIG. So very, very BIG. I'm sure we'd all love to see a similar scene play-out in next week's Top Gear (with, let's say, Clarkson complaining about the handling of a kayak as a Great White streaks towards him), but for today at least, we're talking whales. Whales and non-fiction. What a way to kick off this blog!
Leviathan by Phillip Hoare was one of those landmark reads for me, and most probably for many others too. Winner of the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize, it was a huge success - though, on the surface, you might not have bet on it. Half history of whales and whaling, half literary analysis of Moby Dick, Hoare's future classic could not have been an easy sell to his publisher. But, by gosh and golly, I'll bet Fourth Estate were happy that they took the gamble.
What the book wins on, and this is something that I'll come back to again and again on this blog, is WONDER. There's nothing more wondrous than what is mythically mysterious and yet oh-so-real, and here Hoare's elegant prose - which wouldn't be out of place in an epic novel - is the evoker-in-chief. In masterfully portraying these animals as what they truly are - visible, tangible and yet also magnificently (even terrifyingly) alien - Hoare illustrates whales as the ultimate dream-weavers, with Melville's masterpiece acting as a suitably stupendous example of their power to excite.
Wonder is everywhere in this book. From Hoare's reminiscences of gazing upon the life-size model of a blue whale at the Natural History Museum (or not so life-size - the king of animals is now understood to be a far more streamlined creature) to the achingly evocative description of a whaling expedition and, most incredibly of all, how sperm whales could practise a form of 'religion', this book took me back to a time when being amazed was what I did for a living. Back when, for example, I was kicked out of my local tennis club for talking about dinosaurs too much. Back when I too looked upon that iconic model and felt reverently dwarfed by this spectacular beast.
In the last chapter of Leviathan Hoare describes what feels like the culmination of the entire book - his own face-to-face encounter with a sperm whale. In a hypnotically beautiful passage - the final lines of the book - he looks straight into the animal's eyes and it, sadly, knowingly, looks straight back. Much in the same way that I looked at my killer whale (albeit with added terror and Richard Hammond).
This - in a very round-about way and I do apologise - is what non-fiction must do to us. It must evoke our childhoods, it must inspire dreams, it must make us want to throw down our laptops and run away to sea. It must amaze, appall and allure in the same way that fiction does - though, in fact, it must do all this better than fiction because, by god, IT'S REAL. Where novels help us to escape, non-fiction must make us feel resolutely part of this strange, scary and often wonderful planet of ours, developing and strengthening the sense of our wondrous and real place within a wondrous and real world. If everyone I knew read Leviathan, the world would be about a millionth better. I'm just saying.
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