Our Last Heaven Beast

There are any number of possible readings of Moby Dick. The only one that doesn’t particularly hold water is “it’s about a man’s pursuit of a whale”. It’s unarguably a politically charged allegory that abounds with metaphorical allusions and philosophical asides. Melville appropriates a hoary old myth to hang his metaphysical speculation upon.

In an inspired reversal Philip Hoare takes Moby Dick as the framework for an exploration of the history of mans relationship with whales. At times it makes for uncomfortable reading – there’s something almost unbearably poignant about the rendering of a whale by a furnace fuelled by its own blubber. Thankfully the catalogue of slaughter is punctuated by fascinating asides – “Leviathan” is as much a collection of facts and curiosities as it is a narrative of the parallel decline of the whaling industry and whales.

Whilst he’s clearly enamoured with whales he’s not some misty-eyed hippy. He’s careful to distance himself from some of the more outlandish claims of whale society and religion for instance. Although the Whales are not incidental, in common with Melville, he does have bigger fish to fry ( I know whales are mammals but bear with me ) - The conservationist argument bearing down is obviously meant to apply more widely.

So, finally, why the title? To save you googling - it’s a lyric from “Don’t Kill The Whale” - definitely not Yes’s finest moment. Although I bought the single I still used to think it was mawkish and the description a bit of a stretch. Now, having read Leviathan, I’m not so sure.

The Part About Archimboldi

“The Part About Archimboldi” is the fifth and final part of 2666. Archimboldi is the much fawned over novelist at the centre of “The Part About The Critics” and the device that holds 2666 together (albeit loosely). We follow Hans Reiter’s progress from lacklustre and lonely childhood through the October Revolution, Stalin’s purges, WW2, Dracula’s castle and the sexploits and eventual demise of a priapic Romanian general, to arrive in a prisoner of war camp. Here he meets the pseudonymous Zeller who turns out to have orchestrated the execution of several hundred misdirected Jews (misdirected in the sense that they arrived on his “doorstep” rather than at Auschwitz). The arrangements surrounding the piecemeal slaughter are something of a bureaucratic inconvenience for Zeller. His listless recounting of the piecemeal slaughter is mirrored in the reporting of his murder. Although at this stage his identity has yet to be properly revealed, Hans Reiter (Writer) will later surface as Archimboldi an alias that is more than a nom de plume - Reiter strangled Zeller in what may be his single most civilising act. - There really is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a record of barbarism.

Whilst 2666 is much preoccupied with the problem of “evil” it is also concerned with reputation. Bolano’s reputation as a novelist had been building toward the end of his life and it’s not unreasonable to assume that Amalfitano’s opinion of the pharmacist is his own -

"He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick. . .A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox. . .even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown."

Maybe there’s an element of special pleading in criticising someone who prefers the shorter works of the masters to the masterpieces .There are enough references to masterpieces to be fairly sure Bolano thought he was writing one. The reflections on literary longevity, however, suggest some doubt. They’re strikingly similar to Julian Barnes’s “Nothing To Be Frightened Of”. There comes a time when almost every writer is read for the last time. Their last reader dies and with them all trace of the author. So fame for most writers is transient and posterity is ultimately elusive. Most cannot choose how or even if they are remembered - Archimboldi’s father whose dying wish is to be buried with full military honours is slung into a common pit by his wife and daughter!, the German writer Furst-Puckler more famous as the inventor of Neapolitan(?) Ice-Cream.

Much has been made of the date 2666 as being enigmatic. It alludes to a sentence in “Amulet” that describes a deserted street as like

“a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else”

Maybe it’s simpler than that. Perhaps its’ Bolanos way of saying that by 2666 none of this will matter?