White as the Waves: A Novel of Moby-Dick

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Despite the subtitle, adolescent readers need not have read Melville’s
Moby-Dick in order to enjoy Baird’s lengthy work. It deals with
70-plus years in the life of a sperm whale or cachalot,
White-as-the-Waves (a.k.a. Whitewave), and only in the last three years
does Whitewave come into contact with the one-legged man. Since the
story is told from Whitewave’s perspective, the name Ahab never
appears. In an “Afterword,” Baird says she read Moby-Dick at 13 and
“that [her] sympathies were entirely with the title character.”

White as the Waves is divided into two parts. Part 1 deals with
Whitewave’s birth and the events in the first 30 or so years of his
life as he matures within the family pod and then in a bachelor pod.
Filled with unobtrusive factual information about the cachalot, Part 1
concludes when Whitewave’s mate and her unborn bull calf are killed by
whalers and Whitewave dedicates himself to revenge. Part 2, which begins
a decade later, finds Whitewave attempting to make sense of the world as
he understands it. While he is still killing humans, his motivation is
no longer hatred but the survival of the whales, which are being hunted
into extinction. Whitewave’s concerns about the annihilation of his
kind, along with their culture and knowledge, find many parallels in
today’s world, as does the whales’ ethnocentrism, which denies
humans intelligence.

Writing a novel from a whale’s perspective is an ambitious venture,
and the task is not diminished when the author seeks to link its
contents with a literary classic. Baird succeeds admirably at both
undertakings, though the philosophical Part 2 is at times somewhat
laborious. As a separate read or a novel to be studied in conjunction
with Moby-Dick, White as the Waves should be purchased by all libraries
serving junior- and -senior-high students. Highly recommended.