... [a] delving, haunted and poetic debut. Giggs is worth reading for her spotlight observations and lyricism alone, but she also has an important message to deliver ... she questions the conventional wisdom that all is well with whales now that conservation campaigns have helped their populations rebound ... her journey is intellectual; she relentlessly follows lines of questioning for marathon distances ... she uses whales as invitations to consider everything else: the selfie-ization of environmentalism, the inherent worth of parasites, Jungian psychoanalysis, solar storms, whale songs records going multiplatinum and so much more. In the cascade of mini-essays that results, Giggs comes off as much as a cultural critic as a naturalist ... All this cogitation is both the overall strength and occasional weakness of the book. For in a work about whales, there are few direct encounters with the awe-inducing leviathans; basically, just the single whale-watching tour and two strandings. This can make certain passages feel like a literary distillation of volumes of scientific papers through which actual lobtailing, rainbow-spouting, aria-ululating whales rarely breach. At times, there was so much analyzing of symbolic whales that I felt bereft of actual ones. But maybe that’s the point. Giggs is extremely sensitive to how our 'tormented love' of cetaceans can be 'a need to connect, so dire, that it smothers the beloved'—as when she devastatingly dissects a photo of a mob in Argentina petting a baby dolphin to death.
Giggs has an eye for unforgettable and disturbing details that probe at the ancient and ongoing relationship between humans and whales ... Giggs explores the contours of humans’ obsession with whales over time in terrific specificity. Her investigation is historical, cultural, biological and personal ... All of this is engaging. Yet it is Giggs’ poetic and insightful analysis that elevates this book into something unforgettable ... In the whale, Giggs truly does find the world ... Her prose, previously published in literary outlets such as Granta, is luminous ... In tracing humankind’s continuing intersection with these alluring creatures, Giggs ultimately uncovers seeds of hope and, planting them in her fertile mind, cultivates a lush landscape that offers remarkable views of nature, humanity and how we might find a way forward together.
Giggs’ meticulous research is itself awesome. Every page has its breathtaking revelations. The slant light of facts reveals humanity’s own animal nature ... Giggs only occasionally brings the first-person into focus — childhood museum whales, a vegetarian offered whale flesh, the delicious frisson of love’s inklings. This is part of the work’s ethical approach. Stepping back to observe, and attentive examination and dismantling of anthropocentrism allow better access to the whale and to overarching ecological questions ... For all this wondrous detail, the whale remains a lens through which to consider humanity’s relationship with the environment ... Fathoms’ exhilarating poetic language is richly allusive and orchestrated. Alongside poetry’s capacity to capture and amplify wonder runs a deeper, empathic impulse. Metaphor is a bridge ... Haunted by limited bridgings and the spectre of the future, this marvellous work of haunted wonder ends with a fiercely unabashed vision of humanity moved 'from indecision to action', for whales, for love, for the world.
[A] scintillating debut ... Fathoms is a profound meditation on the mutual devouring of humans and whales. It bends the familiar tale of Jonah into an ouroboros: whale swallowing human swallowing whale ... Giggs’s prose is fluid, sensuous, and lyrical. She has a poet’s gift for startling and original imagery ... Fathoms is as much a triumph of imagination as of intellect. Whereas many of today’s nonfiction writers exalt screen-ready narrative as the pinnacle of the form, Giggs is more versatile and innovative in her approach, melding journalism, history of science, and nature writing with intimate recollections, fanciful jaunts, and insightful contemplation ... Giggs resists the naïve and romanticized, marveling at the beauty and complexity of our planet, while also confronting its horrors.
... delving and lyrically precise ... With fresh perceptions and cascades of facts, Giggs considers our ancient and persistent whale wonderment, high-tech whale hunting, the 1970s Save the Whales movement, global warming, mass extinction, and pollution, including the oceanic plastic plague. She offers a startling assessment of how smart phones pose new perils for the wild, and ponders the loss to our inner lives if we destroy the mystery of the sea. There is much to marvel at here ... Deeply researched and deeply felt, Giggs’ intricate investigation, beautifully revelatory and haunting, urges us to save the whales once again, and the oceans, and ourselves.
... widens the aperture of our attention with a literary style so stunning that the reader may forget to blink ... In a story that extends across several continents, Ms. Giggs marshals lapidary language to give the crisis a compelling voice. Her prose, like the oceans in which her subjects roam, is immersive; her sentences submerge us in a sea of sensations. A reader fond of dog-earing choice turns of phrase in Fathoms might find, at evening’s end, a book pleated like an accordion with an abundance of keepsakes ... Writing this ambitious perhaps inevitably strikes the occasional false note...But these are quibbles about a book that can proudly stand on the shelf with The Whale, Philip Hoare’s 2008 masterwork on how cetaceans have shaped the world’s cultures and environment. Ms. Giggs, like Mr. Hoare, favors paragraphs lacquered with luminous detail, and the authors share a talent for copious research. But the perils faced by whales are an evolving story, so even readers of Mr. Hoare’s chronicle will find new insights in Fathoms ... more descriptive than prescriptive concerning the plight of whales and, by implication, the health of the Earth. But as with George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant and E.B. White’s Death of a Pig, Ms. Giggs, tending the final hours of a humpback on an Australian beach, reminds us that paying attention to the close of another creature’s life can be its own form of moral instruction.
Lyrical ... Facts like these are eye-opening. But the book shines most brightly in its poetry ... Giggs’s writing has an old-fashioned lushness and elaborateness of thought. Still, all that rich language and the author’s meandering philosophical reflections on subjects from parasites to the history of taxonomy can make for slow reading and seem at times to be diversions from the main subject. Also, Giggs focuses too much, for my tastes, on the dying and decomposition of whales and not enough on describing living animals. I wanted more stories about how whales interact with one another and with us ... This is not the book for those kinds of anecdotes. But its finest passages — and they are many — awaken a sense of wonder. That other lives as marvelous and mysterious as these still exist is, for the moment at least, a reason to celebrate.
... immersive ... In lyrical language, Giggs leads readers on a journey through underwater cultures and the place of whales in the chain of life. Recommended for readers interested in nature, ecology, and environmentalism.
The question that the book poses concerns more than just whales. It is demonstrative of the fact that within the whale, both archetype and, painfully, the material bodies of actual whales, is matter with which to divine the whole world. This book is an act of divination: Giggs reads the debris as tea leaves ... deftly presents the chronology of whales as oil, of whales for whales’ sake, to the wider environmental ethic that arose from the anti-whaling campaigns of the 1970s ... As well as being dazzlingly well researched and conveyed, the language in Fathoms is wonderful in that it never becomes sentimental and yet is thoroughly moving. Combining reportage, cultural criticism and poem as a call to action in the spirit of Rachel Carson, Giggs is an assured new voice in narrative non-fiction ... Gloriously, she presents whales as poets ... We need to be moved – therein the particular power of literature to expand the parameters of our compassion. Can you feel compassion for whale lice? For the fleas that live behind whale’s baleens? I’ll bet you can, reading this book. From within and in proximity to the whale, Fathoms expands also towards those that we will never lock eyes with because they are too small, too incomprehensible, too far away ... 'How should I care for that which I do not know, that which I have never met' is a question that also inadvertently echoes that asked of us by this pandemic. More prescient for its time than the author could have imagined.
What makes Fathoms a curious work, when viewed from the perspective of its environmentalism, is that even as it is acknowledging the disgrace of these tangible realities, it is preoccupied with nature as an abstraction in a way that remains stubbornly anthropocentric. It argues that the preservation of wild spaces is important, not simply for the sake of the animals who live in them, or for the pragmatic reason that human beings are ultimately as dependent on the health and sustainability of the planet’s fragile ecosystems as any other living creature, but for the sake of our psychological wellbeing ... For a book that presents itself as a philosophical inquiry and not simply a work of natural history, Fathoms is notable for its cultivated air of philosophical naïvety. Its extensive list of sources is heavy on natural history, light on the kinds of literary and philosophical works that might have provided its imaginative explorations with a clear conceptual framework. Its preferred approach, reflected in its impressionistic prose, is to proceed intuitively. This is fine as far as it goes, but it contributes to the sense that there is something under-examined about the paradoxes of its anthropocentric perspective. The occasional impression that the book is unaware of the provenance of its ideas is less significant than the fact that it ends up being a little flaky around the edges ... In its pursuit of wonderment, Fathoms develops imaginative conceits, which invariably circle back to a self-centring humanism. This is a sentence-level, and even a word-level issue, as much as it is an issue of conceptualisation. The quality that most conspicuously identifies Fathoms as neo-romantic is its mannered prose style. It is a book that wants to be admired for its extensive vocabulary, its descriptive prowess, its startling metaphors, its elegant turns of phrase. It arrives generously blurbed as a ‘poem’ and a ‘hymn’ that is ‘beautifully written’ in ‘inventive prose’, and the early critical responses seem largely to have fallen into line with this assessment. It is, however, none of these things, unless one takes ‘inventive’ as a euphemistic acknowledgement that Fathoms is a book to give a grammarian the howling fantods ... The more you read Giggs’ baroque stylings, the more it becomes apparent that, on a fundamental level, she simply isn’t paying attention ... Giggs’ affected style works against her own thesis, neither contributing to our understanding of whales, nor respecting their essential otherness. The tendency to aestheticise the factual information she wants to convey ends up muddying her thought. Her flamboyantly imprecise metaphors become a form of gratuitous ornamentation: linguistic indulgences that succeed in drawing attention only to themselves.
... should be lauded for its ambition. From the inciting event of the first pages – the author’s encounter with a beached whale in Australia – the book launches into a globe-ranging account of the ecological and cultural significance of whales. Each page is dense with history and anecdotes, facts and figures and musings both personal and philosophical on the nature of whales and, in particular, the relationship between humanity and these almost-alien creatures ... If you have ever stood beneath the massive replica of a blue whale that hangs from the ceiling of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, you will have a good sense of the sort of awe that Fathoms tries to evoke. This sense comes, of course, from the creature itself, but also from the scale of its history and interconnectedness with the rest of the world ... While Giggs certainly foregrounds environmental concerns in the book...she is also interested in how humans have related to whales over time and how this shared past might help us imagine a better future ... It is both a merit of the book and its fatal flaw that it is so voracious ... This is a tic common to the sorts of non-fiction books that try at once to be intensely personal and thoroughly researched: they cannot help but turn back, always, toward the self. For a book of less than 300 pages, it covers an enormous amount of ground both scholarly and personal – but as a result, the account is wide rather than deep ... The book is interesting, even riveting, from moment to moment. Giggs’s commitment to associative thinking lends the whole enterprise a sense of purpose and momentum. But as a whole, the book fails to coalesce into something more meaningful than the sum of its parts. Some of this comes down to the prose, which has been lauded with words like 'lush' and 'poetic,' but which comes across as overwrought in more than a few places. Giggs occasionally finds interesting phrasings or arresting images, but there’s too much dross. The effect is a pleasant one at times, but like sugar melting on the tongue, it leaves only a momentary impression, not a lasting one ... It is apt that a book about humanity’s failure to understand the more-than-human world performs this same failure, even if it does so nobly ... Still, Fathoms is an interesting and sometimes engaging work that takes its subject seriously even if it is not able to perform the necessary philosophical heavy lifting required of the inquiry it makes. But, thankfully, we have another – more famous – whale book for that.
Fathoms shows whales to be what humans have long suspected: not just enormous but enormously complex, with lives and capacities that made them masters of the seas. Until we showed up ... Giggs’ wearying personal musings, combined with far too many 'empurpling driveways' and 'sops of faceless things,' make for a dreary read ... Giggs’ verbosity distracts from the importance of what she’s learned ... Giggs ends Fathoms much where she began with people gathered to view yet another dead whale. Her pessimism is realistic, but her calls for hope are hollow. Fathoms’ unredeemable flaw is that it pays scant attention to the many local, national, and international efforts to save not just whales but our marine environment, some successful, some not, some with lessons yet to be learned, from the creation of marine sanctuaries and stranding rescue networks, to activism to ban plastic bags, end toxics in consumer items, or remove dams, to name a few. Readers and whales deserve a larger story than the one Fathoms gives.
... a research project that encompasses not only physical and ecological elements, but also artistic representations and philosophy. Giggs presents the bounty of that scholarship in crisp, creatively written chapters addressing the many layers of the whale population’s unique physiology and evolutionary history, sociality, above-water balletic athleticism, and enigmatic 'biophony' of their vocalizations. Most importantly, she analyzes how their behavior can be predictive for the Earth’s future. An adventurous explorer, the author immerses readers in an Australian whale watching tour and then dips into the deep international waters of Japan, where whaling ships flourish. With a conservationist mindset, Giggs reiterates that the whale and its life, legacy, and precarious environmental state are reflective of the greater issues the Earth faces, from ecological upheaval to overconsumption. Whether describing the majesty of the blue whale or the human assault on sea ecology due to paper and plastic pollution, the author’s prose is poetic, beautifully smooth, urgently readable, and eloquently informative. Her passion for whales leaps off the page, urging readers to care and—even more so—become involved in their protection and preservation. Throughout the book, the author’s debut, she brilliantly exposes 'how regular human life seeped into the habitats of wildlife, and how wildlife returned back to us, the evidence of our obliviousness.' Refreshingly, she also reveals glimmers of hope regarding what whales can teach the human race about our capacity to ecologically coexist with the natural world ... A thoughtful, ambitiously crafted appeal for the preservation of marine mammals.
