2025/043: And the Ocean Was Our Sky — Patrick Ness, Rovina Cai

"We fight so that we may stop being devils!"
And at this, I could hold back my anger and confusion no longer, even if it killed me. "But what if it's the fighting that makes us so?"
... "And there at last, my dear Third Apprentice," she said, "is the adult question." [p. 102]

This short, gorgeously illustrated novel is a physical and allegorical inversion of Moby Dick. Captain Alexandra leads her crew against the ships of men, determined to avenge the insult inflicted on her years before. The harpoon embedded in her head means she can no longer echo-locate, but has to rely on her crew, including our narrator ('Call me Bathsheba') to direct her. The whales' Above is the men's Below: they dive towards the Abyss -- the border where sea meets air -- to capture men's ships, and to breathe. For all their fearsomeness, they are still mammals, and they need air: but they have developed 'breather bubbles' to minimise these necessary trips to the Abyss. And when a single survivor, with a message for Captain Alexandra from the whale-slaughtering Toby Wick, is discovered on a wrecked ship, he can be kept alive with a breather bubble, to tell the whales what he knows.

Captain Alexandra's obsessive search for the white-hulled ship of Toby Wick is as driven as that of Melville's Ahab, but the ages-long confict between species is a more solid grounding for her emotions, and those of her crew. Bathsheba has seen her own mother butchered by men: she has every reason to continue hating them. Her own grandmother has prophesied that she will hunt, and she is immensely loyal to her Captain and her crew. But Demetrius, the shipwreck survivor, imprisoned in the whales' ship and without hope of reaching land again, makes Bathsheba question the prophecies and the nature of evil.

This may be aimed at a younger audience, but it isn't soft or sentimental. It's a story about war, and hatred, and justifying evil, and about how devils are made. Ness's prose is vivid and unflinching. Rovinda Cai's illustrations (see some here) begin in monochrome, shadowy and sleek, but towards the climax of the novel there is colour, and that colour is red. I was fascinated by the evocation of whale society (cities in the deep, coral engravings, harpoons, heating crabs, scars adorned with jewels), and the war between whales and men, depicted as a more equal conflict than the historical whaling industry, felt queasily satisfying. Such a beautiful book in many ways, with a sense of hope despite the horrors it reveals.