The EconomistNovember 28th 2020 Books & arts 77T
woyearsagoyourreviewerstoodin an
office overlooking the Pacific Ocean at
the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research In-
stitute in Moss Landing, California. Out-
side, giant pelicans sliced through the sea
air. Inside, the walls and windows were
shaken by a below-bass note that boomed
out of huge speakers. This, said John Ryan,
an oceanographer, was the moan of a
humpback whale, the darling of whale-
watchers, known for its impressive fin-
and tail-slapping displays and haunting
“song”. Most recordings of humpbacks
seem almost violin-like, but this was
much, much deeper—barely a sound, more
a vibration that was felt rather than heard.
In the opening scene of “Fathoms”, Re-
becca Giggs describes a very different kind
of encounter with a humpback: on a beach
in Perth, Australia, where a young giant had
found itself stranded. For three days, she
witnessed its enormous mass crushing its
vital organs; the blubber that evolved over
millions of years to keep the species alive
in the frigid abyss now had the opposite ef-
fect. The humpback, she says, “was boiling
alive in the kettle of itself”.
Stirred by this encounter, Ms Giggs em-
barks on a poetic exploration of the largest
creatures alive today. “Fathoms” is a series
of essays that span aeons and vast amounts
of space, from the bottom of the ocean to
the far reaches of the solar system. The
Voyagerprobe carries a recording of hump-
back song; ionic bursts at the surface of the
Sun ricochet through space, provoke the
shimmery displays of the Northern Lights
and eventually disrupt the geomagnetic-
field maps that whales use to orient them-
selves. Throughout, Ms Giggs weaves the
human and whale stories around a central
question: did the conservationists of the
late 20th century save the whales from ex-
tinction-by-slaughter, only to deliver them
to a more insidious demise? From plastics
to toxins, warming oceans, melting sea ice,
acidifying waters and modified sound-
scapes, humanity is warping everything
that whales need to live and thrive.
Many of these changes are reflected in
the whales themselves. Their flesh, guts,
blood and even their song are all, in this
telling, a record of human activity. One
whale is found to have ingested an entire
greenhouse. Postmortems performed on
others reveal gas-bubble lesions, ruptured
ear canals and abnormal nitrogen levels,
all of which are eventually linked to anti-
submarine warfare training. And after the
9/11 terrorist attacks, researchers who were
monitoring stress hormones in North At-
lantic right whales (by analysing their fae-
ces) noticed that their subjects had relaxed,
presumably because most ships temporar-
ily returned to port and, for that time, the
oceans were quiet.
Death runs through the pages. Today it
would be impossible to write a book about
whales that did not combine a sense of awe
with inevitable tragedy. But “Fathoms” is
brilliantly full of wonder. A passage lingers
onwhalelice,describinghow,evennow,
theirgenesholdtracesofanepicmigration
madebyatleastonerightwhaleinthepast
1m-2myears.Anothermarvelsathowthe
decimationof whalesintheoceanshas
transformedecologies onland: thepast
movementsofwhalingcommunitiescan
betracedinaerialsurveysofArcticvegeta-
tion,inplacesmadericherandgreenerby
buriedgiants.A thirdsectionaskswhether
conservingwhalepopulationsmighthelp
stabilisetheclimate.Whalesdrawcarbon
dioxideoutoftheatmosphereanddown
intotheabyss,byfertilisingtinyplankton
withtheirfaeces,aswellaswhentheydie
andsinktotheseafloor.
The tragedy is detached rather than
gory.Inplacesitisbeautiful.Theafterlife
of a whaleis tracked fromthe surface,
where its floating carcass is pecked,
chewedanddebridedbyscavengers,down
throughthewatercolumn,pastfishthat
resemble“bottledfireworks”,toitsresting
placeontheseabed.There,“theballooning
massscattersskinandsoddenflesh...upon
whichgrowsa carpetofwhiteworms.”One
“whalefall”feedsentireecosystems.Itjig-gles with life—crabs, fish, worms, bacteria.
“A whale body is, to this glitter splash of bi-
ology, a godsend,” writes Ms Giggs in one of
her finest turns of phrase.
When she encounters a live whale, she
feels herself shrink to the size of a pinhead
yet retains the detachment that she ap-
plies, elsewhere, to her observation of dead
ones. She does not sense the affinity that
others aver. “Only the most witless individ-
ual would believe in a benevolent connec-
tion with real whales,” she insists. In the
presence of leviathan, “the adrenalin in me
was the kick of imminent danger.” 7Creatures of the deep
Thar she blew
Fathoms.By Rebecca Giggs. Simon &
Schuster; 352 pages; $27. Scribe; £20
The saddest songT
hemomenthesawanorgan,Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart knew what to do with
it. Aged six, already a prodigy on the clavier,
he encountered pedals and stops for the
first time in an Austrian church. Within
moments he was accompanying mass and
improvising freely. In the following year,
1763, an official in Heidelberg was so aston-
ished by his organ-playing that he had a
plate engraved for his church to mark the
boy’s visit. Mozart composed his first sym-
phony at eight. His father wrote that “every
day God performs fresh miracles through
this child.”
Youthful promise often wanes. With
Mozart the reverse was true: his precocity
only hinted at the wonders to come.
Through him classical music may have
found its most ideal expression. As Jan
Swafford writes in his outstanding biogra-
phy, Mozart’s compositions displayed “a
kind of effortless perfection so easily worn
that they seem almost to have written
themselves”. He drafted quickly, often
without needing to revise. He “could dis-
pense delight by the yard”. A man of his
time rather than a reactionary like Bach or a
revolutionary like Beethoven, Mozart was
equally at home composing for the concert
salon or the opera stage.
Mr Swafford eschews myths about tor-
tured genius. Mozart, he insists, “was fun-
damentally a happy man”. Despite his nat-
ural gifts, he worked relentlessly to master
his art. He enjoyed a contented and loving
marriage, and deftly parried his scheming
father, who clung to his coat-tails while re-
senting his success. As he made his life’s
journey from Salzburg to Vienna he re-
mained childlike and obscene, fixatedon
bottoms. Mr Swafford describes “an inex-Lives of the composersToo beautiful
Mozart: The Reign of Love.By Jan Swafford.
Harper; 832 pages; $45. Faber & Faber; £301