Tag Archives: Laline Paull

#BookReview ‘Pod’ by @LalinePaull #contemporary

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Pod by Laline Paull is an environmental allegory for the ocean today, for the state of the world, the climate and for humanity. The topics are huge. Man’s misuse of the ocean and its creatures. Migration and our treatment of refugees who are different from us. Violence against women. Drug addiction. Selfishness and the betrayal of trust and respect for others. The connections of family and the meaning of home. It reminded me of Watership Down, not read since childhood but which made a lasting impression on me. Laline PaullThere are several narratives. The main voice is Ea, a spinner longi dolphin whose inability to hear the music of the ocean prevents her from spinning beautifully. Unable to take part in the annual Exodus ritual, she feels a failure. When tragedy happens in her small pod, she flees and finds herself alone in the ‘vast’. When she joins a huge pod of bigger bottlenose tursiops dolphins, Ea finds a society completely alien to the world she knows. The First Alliance is ruled by lord Ku who, with his second in command lord Split, maintains a strict structure of order using the vira military officers. Devi, first wife and head of Ku’s harem, is a bully who enjoys her power and the hold she has over the co-wives. She plots against rivals and controls the harem’s access to sarpa, the small fish which when eaten have a calming, hallucinogenic effect.
Other voices in Pod include a misplaced humphead wrasse, separated from his kind, who switches gender. A refugee fugu fish who re-starts her cleaning station business in a new unfamiliar home. A prophetic rorqual baleen whale who sings a warning of doom. Google, a dolphin trained, exploited and mis-treated by the military, used by humans as an attack weapon.
And hovering above them all are the anthrops, the humans, recognisable by the noise from their boats and the plastic pollution which the dolphins call ‘moult’. The brutality and cruelty, sometimes unthinking sometimes conscious and glorifying, of man to animals in this book is shaming. Paull doesn’t withhold the brutality of nature, the fights, the sex, the survival of the fittest, the expulsion of the weak who it is assumed will soon die. But there is hope too, the idea that through adaptation, a group can fight to survive. That the oppressed can gain power and strength by combining together.
Quickly read, this book is emotional, shocking and the parallels with the human race are thought-provoking. It has stayed with me long since finishing it.

Read my review of Laline Paull’s climate change thriller, THE ICE.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Horseman’ by Tim Pears #1WESTCOUNTRYTRILOGY
‘A Dangerous Business’ by Jane Smiley
‘The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly’ by Sun-Mi Hwang

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview POD by @LalinePaull https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5Dv via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Ice’ by @LalinePaull #contemporary #thriller

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The Ice by Laline Paull is a climate change thriller which takes place partly in the Arctic and partly in a courtroom in Canterbury. Sean and Tom met as students when Tom attended a meeting of the exclusive Lost Explorers’ Society and Sean was a waiter. They became friends because of their shared fascination for the Arctic. Both go on to forge careers revolving around the Arctic; Tom becomes an environmental campaigner, Sean a businessman. Their friendship, agreements and arguments are key to this novel. When, in chapter one, Tom’s body is revealed by an iceberg calving from a glacier it is the catalyst for all that follows. Laline PaullTom was known to be dead, having died in an accident in an ice cave on Svalbard three years earlier, an accident which Sean survived. An inquest is called, Sean’s business partners fly in to give evidence and to support Sean who is seeing visions of Tom around every corner. It becomes clear that Sean, now divorced and living with one of his investors, Martine, is not hands-on with his business in Svalbard. Midgard Lodge is an exclusive retreat where businessmen and politicians can meet to do deals. Sean’s upfront motivation is to encourage the capitalists to see the Arctic surrounding them, the polar bears, whales and glaciers, and convert them to environmentalism. With this in mind, he recruited Tom to the business. His partners however – the odious Joe Kingsmith and irritating Radiance Young – set my alarm bells ringing very early on. What exactly goes on at Midgard Lodge and why doesn’t Sean, supposedly the CEO, find out? And how could Tom not ask more questions before signing his contract?
There are some big topics touched on here: the opening of shipping channels over the North Pole, the political and military ramifications, the melting of the ice, the wealthy tourists who demand to see the polar bear they were promised in the holiday brochure, business executives who take the money and avoid asking difficult questions because that’s the easiest and most convenient thing to do. To reduce it to essentials, this is a novel about greed and love. How greed can destroy everything: not just business, but friendships, families and ultimately the ice.
I enjoyed The Ice but was left feeling vaguely dissatisfied. A day after I finished reading it, I realized why: it feels like it started out as a thoughtful novel about climate change, but at a later draft was turned into a thriller. The environmental message seemed preachy at times, the business sections were factual and dry, both of which took the edge off the suspense. Told from Sean’s viewpoint, the lack of Tom’s voice for me made the novel weaker. Perhaps it would have been more thrilling if various viewpoints had been juggled so the lies, risks, double-crossing and betrayals happen in real time, rather than the past.

Read my review of POD, also by Laline Paull.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Surfacing’ by Cormac James
‘Under a Pole Star’ by Stef Penney
‘Thin Air’ by Michelle Paver

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE ICE by @LalinePaull http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2zZ via @SandraDanby