The Pod by Laline Paull – book review

Official blurb summary:

Ea has always felt like an outsider. She suffers from a type of deafness that means she cannot master the spinning rituals that unite her pod of spinner dolphins. When tragedy strikes her family and Ea feels she is partly to blame, she decides to make the ultimate sacrifice and leave.

As Ea ventures into the vast, she discovers dangers everywhere, from lurking predators to strange objects floating in the water. But just as she is coming to terms with her solitude, a chance encounter with a group of arrogant bottlenoses will irrevocably alter the course of her life.

In her terrifying, propulsive novel, Laline Paull explores the true meaning of family, belonging, sacrifice – the harmony and tragedy of the pod – within an ocean that is no longer the sanctuary it once was, and which reflects a world all too recognisable to our own.

Taken from Amazon

I picked this book up on a whim, thinking that it looked like an interesting tale about Ea, a spinner dolphin with a disability, and how she learns to overcome this. I had thought that it was going to quite a casual book, that maybe told a heart-warming tale about surviving adversity and life as a dolphin. I had seen reviews of people saying it was quite heavy, so I had sort of expected there to be some mention of perhaps global warming and ocean pollution, but that these would be either challenges for Ea to overcome or just a fact of life in the ocean that she had always known existed.

Needless to say, this book was not heart-warming in the slightest. This book was not a casual story about a dolphin finding herself in the ocean. Oh no…I was COMPLETELY wrong. I will put a very big trigger warning for this book though in that it does contain scenes of abuse, R and SA. So if you are at all sensitive to those subjects then maybe it would be best to skip this story. I will say though that the mention of these subjects are all fundamental parts of the story – they are not added in just for shock factor as some book series tend to. But…a warning none the less.

I saw some people refer to it as War and Peace but with dolphins and…that about sums it up. I won’t go into too much details about the actual story as I don’t want there to be too many spoilers in case any of you readers do wish to pick it up, but I will mention some very brief plot points below so if you don’t want to be totally blind going into the book, look away now! I have to say this book was indeed quite the adventure. It was also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and I can completely see why.

What I really enjoyed about this book was that whilst it mainly focused on Ea, the spinner dolphin, it also had some subplots that involved other marine life that I have not really read much about in fiction before. One example is that a Wrasse has a very interesting sub plot, which deals with the gender fluidity of some fish species as well as the impact of overfishing and commercial fishing on these fish communities. I also really enjoyed the subplot with Google, a bottlenose dolphin who was bred and trained to be a bomb detection animal for a science project (I think).

One criticism I have of the book is that there were almost too many subplots that played very minor, if any, major relevance to the overall story of Ea. I would also say that this has vastly changed my opinion on dolphins, especially bottlenose dolphins, because the bottlenose dolphins that Ea encounters on the journey are….well they’re really quite horrible. I would also say that the ending, for me, seemed to come out of nowhere. The story seemed to be going in one direction and then all of a sudden it ends with some bizarre blood bath. I want to say that this is meant to relate to the dolphin hunts that happen in Japan every year, but there is very little explanation given and so it isn’t really clear what is happening or why it is happening.

I have seen that one big issue people have with this book is that it is not always very clear what is happening. I think the author does a good job of telling a story through the eyes of a dolphin, in that perhaps a dolphin would not know what a fishing net looks like or what a hook is, but especially with the bizarre climax the book it would have been nice as a reader to have that little bit more explanation given. I am already suspending my belief enough to believe that this story is exactly how dolphins think and behave, or how the other characters in the book do behave in the wild, so I think I could have suspended belief enough to just accept that Ea has a better understanding of the human world and the happenings above the surface than would probably be true in the wild.

I also agree with some people’s comments that this book could have been multiple books that focused on each of the subplots in more detail. For example, one subplot involves a whale who has lost his herd, and throughout his story there is mention of the commercial fishing liners and increased boating networks that have caused regular migratory pathways to be lost or damaged. I would have loved to have read a story solely on this issue, as I think it is something that is very rarely spoken about in the wider debate around our treatment of the ocean and it would be so beneficial to share a story that fully focusses on this aspect of ocean protection. But again the story doesn’t, and so we are left with a few stories that just seem to end without any real resolution or further exploration. Personally, I love a good, thick story book – one of my favourite books of all time is IT by Stephen King and that book weighed about 5kg – so I wouldn’t have been put off by an insanely big book if it meant that all of these stories and subplots could be given the detail and attention and the urgency that they all rightly deserved. However, I do also understand the need for ‘shelf appeal’, and I know that many readers out there don’t enjoy reading books so epic in length that holding them open counts as a gym work out.

That being said though, I did still find the overall story enjoyable to read, even if there were parts that were very emotionally draining. I know that the author has written another story that focuses on a bee hive (called – simply – The Hive), and I am intrigued to see if this is written in a similar manner to The Pod.

Overall: 7/10. I think this book is a great starting point for many of the issues it raises, and I feel it could be a very good introduction for many people into the perils marine life does face, however for me personally, this felt like a story that ended far too abruptly.

Have you read this book? Have you read any of the author’s other books? What were your thoughts? Do you have any other recommendations for books? I am always keen to read more and will take any and all recommendations that you have!

T xxx