Hello, Mr. Abrams. You’re currently on virtual tour with Eye of the Whale. Will you briefly tell us about the book?
It’s an eco-thriller about a marine biologist named Elizabeth who must risk everything to decipher the mysterious song of a trapped whale and its implications for human survival.
Tell us about your main character.
My main character, Elizabeth McKay, is a marine biologist who has spent her career trying to crack humpback whale communication, and in particular their song, the most complex in the animal world. When the song changes dramatically and suddenly, she must figure out why and what the meaning of the new sounds might be. She has to crack the code to save the whale and ultimately she discovers much more.
Your last book, The Lost Diary of Don Juan, was a wonderful success. I can’t help but notice the dramatic switch to ecological thriller. What influenced you to go from Don Juan to whales?
I am interested in stories that explore the fault lines of human life, the questions that reveal our human nature and the world we live in. I start out every novel with a question, not an answer.
One day, the question behind Eye of the Whale came to me as I was sitting by the fire reading my twin daughters a children’s story about a trapped whale, just after another whale had swum up the Thames. A scientist friend was visiting and started telling me some astonishing facts about new environmental dangers to our children’s and other animals’ health. I asked myself: what if these events were connected? What if whales and humans were threatened by the same dangers? I knew that the answer to this question would result in a thrilling and important story. I had no idea when I started quite how thrilling and important the story I discovered would be.
This is a question that many of us are increasingly asking ourselves: Can we survive, and what might be stronger than our greed, our fear, and our denial? I needed an answer to this question, and there is no better place to ask questions about human nature than in the fictional world.
You mention on your Web site that you did research with leading scientists for this book. What kind of research was involved?
I worked with some of the world’s leading scientists—marine biologists, eco-toxicologists, veterinarians, physicians, and others. I also believe in experiencing what my characters experience, so I went swimming with the whales in Tonga, cage diving with the great white sharks off the Farallon Islands, and even met modern day whalers in the Caribbean.
Was there any point in your research that you were stunned/awed by what you were discovering?
I discovered that there is an environmental threat as grave as global warming, and it is doing to our bodies what global warming is doing to our climate. It is called endocrine disruption—toxic chemicals are shifting our fundamental physiological processes in the body. It has been linked to a rise in infertility, childhood cancers, breast and prostate cancer, birth defects, even autism and the decrease in the number of boys that are being born. We know what’s happening at the macro, but I had no idea what was happening at the micro level.
What are you working on now?
Right now I’m waiting for the next question to come to me. Meanwhile, I’m so consumed with the exciting interest with Eye of the Whale and the promotion of the novel that I don’t have a ton of time to be asking that question.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
In the end this is a very hopeful book, because what we discover is that so much human disease and suffering is actually man-made. If it’s man-made, it’s not inevitable. We can turn around a great deal of this suffering. People alive today face perhaps the greatest challenges to our survival that any generation has ever faced—climate change and chemical pollution being perhaps the two most severe. If we meet these threats, these forces of opposition, we will be the most heroic generations of humans to have ever lived.
