Morley Weidenfeld £12.99 pp250

THE HIGHEST TIDE
by Jim Lynch

Bloomsbury £10.99 pp247

Novels these days tend to be heavily ballasted with knowledge. John David Morley tells us most of what we need to know about sperm whales, while Jim Lynch pitches in with everything one can find that squirts, scuttles or burrows in the sand between high and low tides in Puget Sound on America’s northwest coast. Neither novelist uses his knowledge gratuitously, but integrates it skilfully into both plot and theme.

Daniel Serraz, Morley’s narrator, is an insurance man of mysterious parentage, keen from an early age on tropical fish and swimming (his parents apparently drowned exploring coral reefs), brought up in Switzerland by an unreliable grandmother and married to a homeless Japanese woman. The part of the insurance company that Serraz works for is known as the Lost Property Office, dealing with clients whose risks are unusual and not easily evaluated: a magician, involved in tricks with fire, wanting to insure his beard; a gourmet, his liver. Serraz concludes that “the general public completely underestimated what a high-risk venture life is” and so, of course, it proves with his own. After three abortive pregnancies, his wife departs for Japan, he undergoes heart surgery and, given leave of absence, makes for the isolated Indonesian island of Lefó, where the inhabitants still live by catching manta rays, sharks and whales from their small sailing boats. Serraz himself is in one of the boats when a whale appears . The harpoonist leaps from the bows on to the whale, plants his harpoon and slides into the water before scrambling back on board. The climax of his story, however, is the appearance of a huge sperm whale, “The Extraordinary Creature”, which begins by performing a sort of dance of defiance in full view of the islanders and then, when they pursue and spear him, drags three boats for days before destroying two and leaving all three crews in one boat, adrift in the Indian Ocean.

But Morley’s fine novel is not primarily a story of derring-do. On the contrary, it is an elaborate and skilfully constructed pilgrimage, with many way-stations of self-discovery, from the heights of modern, polished, fully insured Swiss civilisation, via the aboriginal island community, whose Christianised inhabitants believe in ancient spirits and that their boats have souls, to the depths of the ocean, where whales communicate over vast distances and traverse a huge three- dimensional world. Of course, our civilised world is gradually eating into both the others. The whales are threatened with over- killing, and by the end of this book the boats have been replaced by ones with outboard motors, while the island has been transformed by tourism. Serraz tries to evaluate the gain and loss. Back in Switzerland, he reads a letter from a friend in Lefó describing the improvements — roads, electricity, TV, running water, an airport. But “what he missed, in the end, was the sea . . . He could see it, he could hear it down there. But did it still hear him . . . ? The descendants of the old whale people of Lefó had fallen from grace with the sea. Somehow they were no longer of it, or it of them”.

The Highest Tide is a more conventional novel, with a more straightforward ecological message. Its narrator is a perky 13-year-old whose lack of love at home makes him a precocious disciple of the environmentalist Rachel Carson, and sends him out to the shore, where he becomes so expert in the local marine biology that he can find creatures that shouldn’t be there, prompting him to remark to one of the journalists who descend in shoals that “the earth is trying to tell us something”. He is not quite as irritating as he might sound, since the author is wily and persuasive enough to offset his hero’s miraculous powers with his pragmatism, his dislike of being made a celebrity and his naivety in other directions, notably sex. The writing is good, too, and there are plenty of facts to be absorbed about sea creatures, but the human part of the story is a bit of a jellyfish: not poisonous, just a touch squashy.

Available at Books First prices of £11.69 and £9.89 (Jim Lynch) on 0870 165 8585

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