Christopher Moore “Fluke”
This was my first book by this author, about whom I have heard many good things. Looks like this wasn’t the best one to start with, because it didn’t exactly turn me into a raving fan.
I’m not saying it was a bad book. It certainly had its funny parts and the story had a good pace and was reasonably interesting, even though the sickly sweet happy end was not quite to my taste (are they ever?). But it didn’t exactly blow me away, either. Then again, even though I kind of like whales on the whole, I am not terribly interested in them. So reading a whole story about them can hardly be expected to overly excite me.
In this entertaining adventure-in-whale-researching Nathan Quinn, a prominent marine biologist, has been conducting studies in Hawaii for years trying to unravel the secret of why humpback whales sing. During a typical day of data gathering, Nate believes his mind is failing: the subject whale has “Bite Me” scrawled across its tail. Events become even stranger as the self-proclaimed “action nerds,” Nate, photographer Clay, their research assistant Amy, and Kona, a white Rasta (a Jewish kid from New Jersey), encounter sabotage to their data and equipment. They also observe increasingly bizarre whale behavior, including a phone call from the whale to their wealthy sponsor to ask that Nate bring it a hot pastrami and Swiss on rye, and discover both a thriving underwater city and the secret to what happened to Amelia Earhart.
I quite liked most of the characters, especially the old broad. (But, honestly: Amelia Earhart? Was that necessary?) There also were some interesting and inventive details that amused me. One thing that kept distracting me a great deal, though, was that as soon as the story came around to the whaley-boys and Gootown and all this, it reminded me a lot of Frank Schätzing’s “The Swarm” (which I loved). That was an unfortunate connection, because Schätzing’s novel is very different and darker in tone (well, up until the bloody happy end, but I tend to blend that one out in my recollection). So even though the basic idea of the 2 books is pretty much the same, the resulting stories are very different. I liked them both, but for re-reading one of them I would give precedence to Schätzing’s.
I have signed up for one more bookring of a Christopher Moore book: “Practical Demonkeeping”, but it will be a while before I get that one. I will keep Moore on my list of writers worth giving more chances to excite me, though.
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