On Ken’s recommendation, I picked up a book by Christopher Moore. Not familiar enough with his work to spend all the money on the hardback edition of his new book, I settled on one of his many other books, Fluke. It was a bestseller afterall, so even if it wasn’t “good” it would still be palatable, as are other mainstream bestseller books.
Fluke is about this whale researcher, Nathan Quinn, and his photographer partner, Clay Democodus, and their adventures in researching the meaning of the songs of the humpback whale.
Ok, if you’ve read the book, you know that that description is a load of crap, but I can’t very well tell you what the book is really about without giving too much away, can I? Well, let’s see…
Clay hires an assistant, Kona, who is as much a native to their research station’s Hawaiian home as a Jersey bridge and tunnel dweller. And then there’s beautiful, mysterious, and somehow awkwardly dated Amy, the unpaid intern, who Nate can’t take his eyes off, but knows better, having been divorced from prior research assistants more than once.
Nate’s ex-wife appears in the story, and the story of how she left him is shockingly and humorously fantastic. Yes, she became a lesbian, but it wasn’t just out of the blue, and it certainly wasn’t always in her somewhere.
Moore’s writing style is oddly very much like mine when I’m in my best-focused humor mode. It’s a kind of dry staccato, with lots of contradictions. And maybe it’s odd, maybe not, but I kind of like my own writing, and so it follows that I also like his.
There isn’t much bad to say about this book. The end slows down a little, and I felt that while he characters might not have known what was going on, the author could have given us a more omniscient view to keep us entertained. The very end also left a few things untidy. Did Nate and Amy get to see each other every few months? I read the last two pages several times and still couldn’t figure out what was going on there, and I feel slightly ripped-off after having read the rest of the novel.
Apart from these things, which don’t amount to much, the book was a very entertaining read, and although not entirely based in science, had just enough information about whales to make the topic much more entertaining than a dull Discovery Channel special on whale songs.
My only worry here is that because this was apparently a “special” book by Moore’s standards (being that this one seems written to direct the reader’s attention toward whale conservation issues, in much the way that Live Aid would direct your attention toward Ethiopian famine), his other books won’t be as quality. But I more get the impression that it would lean the other way - his other books may be superior because they are not laiden with the burden of drawing attention to anything but themselves.
For that reason, I think I may just pick up that hardback.
I’ve already started the next book that was recommended on that post, Shadow of the Wind, but I’m only a few pages in and don’t have a good impression of it yet.
