I just finished Whalefall, loved it and need to discuss
Hella spoilers, sailors beware.
First off, this felt like a very personal and relatable book to me. Growing up in a coastal fishing/tourist/diving town, the environment felt tangible. My father was also a complex man of deep conviction, similarly publicly lauded but unstable and brutal behind closed doors. He also died during COVID of workplace/lifestyle related lung failure and left a lot of unresolved pain for his distanced children to soft through. For this reason I loved Mitt being a complex character, not a comical 2-dimensional portrayal of an angry abusive psychopath. I adore a multi-faceted antagonist and Mitt felt so deeply human and flawed. You could tell he wanted to have a relationship but just couldn't find a way to relate to his son who was so fundamentally different to him. Again, heartbreakingly relatable to me personally. Hard disagree with one take I saw that said Jay was misremembering his interactions with Mitt and that was the reckoning at hand. I think that repaints Mitt as a one-dimensional benevolent figure, and puts the onus of recasting abusers as good people onto victims. Mitt can be simultaneously abusive towards Jay and a mythical hero figure in his community. I also think there's small background tidbits that the rest of the family was not as uncritically fawning over Mitt as Jay assumed they were. TL;DR I love difficult people and complex family dynamics
Anyways, aside from the relatability of the background and characters, I actually was pretty intrigued by the premise. I'm a big fan of survival horror and this worked for me. I had to suspend a lot of disbelief, of course, but I was very forgiving because I loved the premise and the setup. The internal descriptions and physical punishment Jay goes through were visceral and brutal. I appreciate the author didn't hold back on actually hurting our main character. By the end he's basically a shattered pulpy skeleton. There were a couple of scenes that actually made me cringe, even as a seasoned horror and gore fan. RIP Beaky, what a real one🙏
As for the prose and timeline jumps, it took me a quick chapter or two to get accustomed but it felt natural very early on, and I realized some way through the book I adored the writing style. It felt vivid and cerebral for what is inarguably a very metaphorical experience. Gorgeous writing. The time jumps for me were necessary and didn't detract from the tension of the situation at hand. It just felt like reading two stories I was deeply invested in side by side, and they feed into each other. I can understand criticisms of it but for me it was genuinely so beautiful.
Any of my criticisms are mostly negligible (giant squid bioluminescence?? This whale having the busiest day of its cetacean life between squid fights and orca battles and dying?), I think the biggest issue for me was understanding all the equipment. It comes up a lot and it feels as though the reader is supposed to have an innate understanding of how it all works. And even having grown up around world famous scuba and dive sites, there was a lot that went over my head. But other than that this was a solid 10/10. Visceral, emotional, metaphorical. Resonated hard with me. Also excited for the movie but a little apprehensive about how all of it will translate to screen. Im thinking the whale parts will be visually interesting, hoping we get some brutal physical scenes, but I'm a little anxious about how well the complexities of a fraught father-son relationship can translate in a constrained time slot. TBD.
In the meantime I need to hear other peoples thoughts, opinions, criticisms I missed.