What do you do when you’ve been obsessed with whales all your life, to such an extent that you’ve become an expert on Moby Dick? Of course, you write a book about it, non-fiction, trying to make sense of your psychological deviance and looking for a way to incorporate this into the history of a country which has engaged on a course of deviant psychological damage. A country which has become a beached whale, just as you are a beached whale, just as a beached whale is a beached whale. It’s a somewhat tenuous theory, but Riley milks it for all it’s worth and the book includes revelatory moments. Above all in the way it traces the evolution of a beached whale society, the scavengers and fetishists who feel the pull of the whales, just as the whales themselves feel the pull of the tides which erroneously cause them to commit an auto-de-fe by choosing land over water. These characters represent an alternative Britain, none more so than the mythical ‘Big Blue’ to whom a truly wondrous chapter is dedicated, a character so Dickensian he feels he really ought to be fictional. These oddballs, some using the whale as a metaphor for the possibilities of Brexit, as opposed to the author’s use of the metaphor as the catastrophe of Brexit, construct a fascinating map of the island’s coastal regions, the point of elision between the values of the nation state and the values of the deep. At times it feels as though Riley slightly overplays his hand as he seeks to impose his map of the whale territory on the map of the country, but this is nevertheless a book that conjures out of its unlikely thesis an engaging, off-centre read.
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