Christopher Moore's brand of humor, while always irreverent and sometimes off-color, also bursts through the constraints which might limit it to the real world. Moore has often explored other realities, and in this novel, we discover the underwater world of singing whales and the researchers who study them. Far more "straight" and less frivolous in this story than in most of his earlier novels, Moore is clearly fascinated by cetacean biology and the research on which he focuses here.
Nate Quinn is a PhD researcher who studies the subsonic songs of humpback whales and works the channel between Maui and Lanai, identifying and following individual whales, recording whale songs, and converting the songs into digitized computer programs in an effort to decode them. Three other researchers and numerous other wacky characters allow the author plenty of room for hijinx at the same time that he is exploring serious issues. An old woman gets a phone call from a whale wanting a hot pastrami on rye with mustard, a researcher remains underwater for sixty minutes without breathing, an absolute ruler wants the navy to "nuke the goo," and mutants who look like aliens, known as whaley-boys, walk the land.
When a navy captain refuses to reveal information about his research, rumors surface that the navy may be building a torpedo testing range inside the whale sanctuary. Soon one of the research crew is injured and two disappear, and as Moore shifts from science to science fiction, the line between reality and fantasy disappears. The reader willingly suspends all disbelief and falls under the spell of Moore's non-stop flights of imagination as he explores an underwater colony, populated by 5000 people, who live 600 feet below the surface of the ocean. Moore's famous sense of the absurd, his irony, and his humor, some of it black, never flag, as his imagination, given free rein, soars in this wild fantasy.
However playful it may be, this novel also marks a significant new direction for Moore. He is clearly fascinated by whales and the threats to their existence, and while the book is great fun to read and often very funny, it also has something serious and important at its heart--it is not frivolous entertainment. In an unprecedented move, Moore adds three separate Author's Notes at the end of the book, updating the reader on current whale research and acknowledging some of the world's great whale researchers and research facilities. Readers will come away from this novel with broad smiles, a new appreciation for Moore's talents and his willingness to take risks, and, most significantly, new understandings of whales and the ecosystem in which they flourish. Mary Whipple
