Three-quarters of the way up Norway’s west coast, the islands of the Lofoten archipelago rear out of the Atlantic, towering mightily from the deep sea. They are the spectacular setting for Shark Drunk, in which Morten Strøksnes, a journalist, and his friend Hugo Aasjord, an artist, set out to catch a Greenland shark.
This singular fish lives for centuries. It grows to more than 20 feet long, passing hundreds of years at enormous depths preying on sleeping seals. (That seals nap on the seabed is one of Shark Drunk’s surprises.) It is inedible: a toxin in the meat induces a fatal inebriation, hence the book’s title. The beast’s eyes glow luminous green, attracting finger-long parasitic worms that hang from its eyeballs, rendering it blind.
Why anyone should want to haul this monster to the surface eludes the reader, as it does Strøksnes and Aasjord. Both are fascinated by the mysteries of the sea, which the shark embodies. Aasjord comes from a fishing family, but he has never seen one. This is as close as the book comes to a motive. The friends catch cod and attract a couple of shark bites, but it is not spoiling anything to reveal that they land no monster.
Mostly, they sit in a boat, talking little, leaving Strøksnes to ruminate whimsically on sharks, sea life, evolution, the culture and history of Norwegian fishing communities and the work of Olaus Magnus, the 16th-century bishop who wrote a guide to the Northern Peoples and produced a map illustrated with sea monsters.
If the book’s associative structure occasionally feels like a saunter through pages of Wikipedia, there is a trove of interest here, too. We learn that the dana octopus has luminescent organs on its arms and hunts in packs, all flashing beacons. (Its victims must think they are being attacked by Christmas ornaments, Strøksnes comments.)
We also learn there is a squid that shoots out clouds of light, while the ocean looks blue because blue light penetrates furthest in water. Hunting the blue whale led to scenes of utter horror: live foetuses were cut from their mothers’ wombs and incinerated. Scientists have discovered a fin whale that sings at 52Hz, while all the rest of its species are on 20. They call it the world’s loneliest whale.
Isolation was a problem for Norwegian lighthouse keepers; the Norwegian Lighthouse Association had a mobile book collection it circulated among them to stop them going mad. Lighthouse keepers, like all Norwegians, owe their climate to the Gulf stream, which daily carries as much heat to Europe as is generated by a decade of the world’s coal consumption.
Strøksnes’s sidelong approach to science is beguiling. He describes water molecules connected by hydrogen bonds as dancers changing partners billions of times a second. Think of them as letters, he says: “The sea contains all the books ever written in known and unknown languages. In the oceans, other languages and alphabets also arose, such as RNA and DNA, molecules in which genes connect and disconnect in the waves that wash through the helical structures and determine whether the result will be a flower, fish, starfish, firefly or human being.”
Fanciful as this is, it does lead him to a lovely next line: “A gentle wind blows in from the rich library of the sea.”
There are moments of adventure, when Strøksnes goes diving and is seized by a current, and when the friends catch too many cod on a winter day and are nearly swamped, but the triumph of this book is its descriptions. Of the Lofoten peaks, the Norwegian painter Christian Krohg wrote: “The purest of the pure, the coldest of the cold, the grandest imaginable, altars to the God of solitude… how difficult to paint this! To convey the elevation, the grandeur and nature’s inexorable, merciless calm and indifference.”
Advertisement
Through observation, Strøksnes meets the challenge. A Lofoten word, transtilla, describes perfect calm. Strøksnes notes the water “licking at the underside of its own surface, which gleams above the hollows and high shoals. The sea is a cohesive sheet of light, so bright that it seems to illuminate itself.” Humans are never so well portrayed, though Strøksnes is good on the atmospheric currents of male friendship. He deals with a conflict with Aasjord by adopting a silence “like a deaf shellfish”.
Its beauty, undemanding science and soothing, musing qualities have made the book a bestseller in Norway and beyond. In vexed times, gently informative escapism is a winner for publishers and a refuge for readers. Strøksnes nails the appeal in a single paragraph. “The landscape is not in front of me. It’s all around me. There is a strong sense of here in the physical ocean current near the Skrova lighthouse. It feels very far away from the information current of everyday life in which we usually float.”