The Whale’s Last Song by Joanne Fedler

It’s a new year, fresh and shiny with potential, so I thought we could start off with one of the most gorgeous, hopeful books. Something whose influence carried me through the last few months of last year.

I have found it very hard to describe what this book is. A children’s story for adults, perhaps. Or a comforting fairytale. Perhaps it would be easiest for me to tell you about how I came to read it.

Words, Stories, and a Journey

There is an independent bookshop around the corner from where I live, which hosts regular book launches. I love going to these events. You get a glass of wine and a stimulating discussion about books (and depending on the subject matter, politics, social commentary or the human condition). Unfortunately I am not always in a position to buy the books (new books, and especially local books are expensive).

But by the end of Joanne’s talk I knew I had to have her book, and after reading it I know it will never leave my shelves again.

Joanne talked about how losing her mother affected her, about how she struggled with grief, and how she found comfort in a child’s story. And somewhere in all those experiences something opened up. She described writing this book as a transcendent experience, that it was like a voice bubbled up from somewhere deep.

And the words that bubbled up were beautiful. She talked about the joy of the words, of wanting to read them aloud as a mother reads to her child. Then she read to us the gorgeous prologue, like savouring a mouthful of chocolate dessert.

The writing is beautiful, lyrical and tangible. She uses all sorts of interesting metaphors that draw a physicality into the writing. Just look at these:

Each of us hopes for something beyond the day-to-day curvatures of circumstance and millstones of obligation.

Curiosity is a kind of light, which eagles the spirit. It is the enskyment of the self, no matter the confinement of the body.

His chest tightened. His ribs were shrinking around him, like claws closing in on prey.

I have actually found this writing rather inspiring. I am, or I have been in the past, inclined to do the same with my own writing, but for some reason I stopped. Since reading this book I have found those similes slipping back in.

I was enraptured. But prosaically there were also only limited copies of the book. The Australian publishers did not purchase rights for South Africa. So Joanne (apparently also an intrepid entrepreneur) had a limited print run made of her own books which she brought to sell during this series of events.

But, what is it about?

Well Joanne talked about various other influences and how they became part of this wonderful story. How her hobby as a open water swimmer, became a love song to the ocean and its creatures. She read the diaries of Etty Hillesum, who died in a Nazi concentration camp, and how the selflessness and resilience of this woman affected her. She talked about the universal longing for belonging we all feel. She ruminated on the strange and special ways that objects come into our lives and are passed on, the way these objects become their own stories. An object from her own life even became part of the story.

This book is about family and belonging, what that means to each of us and how much any one of us is prepared to sacrifice for it.

It’s about courage, stepping into the unknown and allowing the winds of chance to carry you where they will with an open heart.

It’s about being true to yourself and your values, especially where you might have lost sight of what those values are.

It’s a rumination on leadership and corruption. An exploration of intergenerational trauma.

It’s also about nature and the world and our place in it, our responsibility as humans to it and the way it has built us.

The book talks of seeing things not as they appear, but as they really are. Letting go of what you thought the world was about, of the stories you had been told, and looking for your own ways to understand it. That each (micro) act of selflessness is giving back to the world in some much larger way.

The author treats her characters with such kindness (even when they do really quite stupid things). And in this kindness are they empowered to grow.

Loving something was more important than understanding, especially loving something you couldn’t understand.

But the central themes that flow beneath everything else, easily forgotten in the action of the story was the whale and his song.

Remember how this book came from a place of grief? In dying a whale becomes a place of bounty, a feast for generations of other sea creatures – that is whalefall. In choosing it’s place of death, the whale becomes a metaphor for dying on one’s own terms. That this is often the only blessing we can leave in the world. We have so little control of life, so many runaway consequences, so how, when and what happens after we die is the only gift we can leave behind.

For the whale, for the sea, for us as individuals there is a song that underlies everything and each of our actions is just a single note.

It’s a special book that has wrapped warm, dare-I-say maternal arms around my soul. Also the cover is stunningly beautiful. I wish everybody would get a chance to read it.