A Whale of a Time
“I’m a Midwestern guy. I didn’t grow up around oceans. And I’m not a strong swimmer,” says Daniel Kraus, author of the Californian, oceanic, swimming-and-diving novel Whalefall. (Image by Suzanne Plunkett; Book cover courtesy of Daneil Kraus) In Whalefall, novelist Daniel Kraus, MS ’06 IS, tells the story of 17-year-old Jay Gardiner’s search for his dead father’s bones. Only there’s a catch: they’re somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. What unfolds is an intense and exciting hero’s journey that takes Jay deep inside himself—and deep inside the belly of a sperm whale, where he fights for his survival.
The premise sounds implausible, yet you make it believable. The impetus for the book was that I wanted to treat the Biblical Jonah story with scientific and biological accuracy. I talked with whale experts as I developed the plot, and they would listen to my ideas and say, “You know, that is theoretically possible.” So, that’s why it’s believable: We got the science right.
How did you learn so much about diving and whales? Going in, I didn’t know anything about either subject. I’m used to deep-diving into research for my books: reading, watching documentaries and so on. But this was different. No one’s ever really written on this topic, so for a few months, I interviewed whale scientists and divers and learned everything I could.
How did you develop your ideas about Jay’s survival? I learned early in my research that [sperm] whales eat everything. And as I was figuring out the plot, I thought of this great scene in [the movie] Apollo 13, where Mission Control looks at all the tools the astronauts have up in space and figures out how they can use them to get home. I basically did the same thing with the whale’s stomach: What could the whale eat that might give Jay a shot at getting out?
