A Review of The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles by Jason Guriel

Review by Daniel Cowper

Jason Guriel, The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles. Biblioasis, 2023.

Review by Daniel Cowper

The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles is Jason Guriel’s second verse novel written entirely in rhyming couplets. It tells the story of The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles (a young adult verse novel about Melvillian werewolf whalers) becoming a pop-culture juggernaut in the late 21st century. Guriel interweaves with his principal narration the storyline of that imaginary work, though the passages we are given are drawn not only from the canonical version, but also from fanfictions recasting the plot within alternative settings: plant/wolf hybrids sailing a sand sea on plant-based hovercraft; werewolf astronauts in space; were-mechs flying through a Cloud-Sea using alien anti-gravity technology.

A girl named Cat (a character carried over from Guriel’s first verse novel Forgotten Work, reviewed by NVR this past summer) finds the fictional Full-Moon (printed in an animatronic binding that literally howls to be read) on a shelf in a Montreal bookshop, and introduces her friend Kaye to the book and its growing fandom. Kaye becomes a university student in a futuristic culture increasingly obsessed with the characters, mythology, and mystery surrounding that fictional book and its vanished author, Mandy Fiction.

There is much for a reader to enjoy in watching Kaye explore her world, and watching her world change around her, until its technology becomes itself a kind of Deus Ex Machina. Ultimately, Kaye witnesses an unexpected apotheosis of the fictional Full-Moon, one which perhaps reveals the purpose of human technology to be the merging of imagination with reality.

It should be emphasized that although Kaye is the focal point of the narrative, she is more a witness than a protagonist. The true hero of Guriel’s The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles is the fictional Full-Moon. Guriel’s story, at its core, is not about the individual characters but about how an imagined book extends its imaginative influence into an imagined future world.

This book is therefore a fusion of a poem, a science fiction novel, and a post-modern metafiction. Remarkably, it is an organic whole: each of these three dimensions of the book justifies, and is justified by, the other dimensions. Yet it is difficult to describe the qualities of book without separating out these ingredients. So I will briefly describe each: poetic style, futuristic content, and theme.

What shall we say about the poetry? Rhyming couplets that go on for 381 pages cannot be compared to the usual one-page lyrics, and require some critical contextualization—at least nowadays they do.

The distinction between the lyric and narrative modes was once a matter of cliché, and I think those clichés would be helpful for contemporary readers: a lyric would be compared to a bird’s rapture of song or flight, while a narrative poem would be likened to a voyage by ship. One might say that the main aim of lyric verse is to intoxicate the reader, like wine; the main purpose of narrative verse is to propel the reader forwards, like an engine.

Guriel’s heroic couplets function in this classic narrative style, providing a regular impetus of stylistic energy, like a rower’s steady oar strokes—or, to pick a goofy image from the book, like the puff of wolves’ breaths filling a schooner’s sails. Some of Guriel’s couplets are witty; some pretty; some wise; and very many do not call attention to themselves. But while the speed and tone of the couplets vary, they are always driving the boat ahead, as in an early scene at a Full-Moon fan convention:

          One young girl with bright eyes
          Had constructed, based on Chapter Four,
          The bedroom where Paige sleeps, her wolfish snoring
          On a loop. The room gave off the smells
          A wolf’s den might—and had the jar of shells
          In which Paige hides the locket. It was faithful
          To the text, said Cat, but for a bagel,
          Half-consumed on Paige’s floor of clawed
          And wold-worn tiles. (“It’s a little nod
          To Montréal,” the bright-eyed girl explained.
          “We’re from there too!” squealed Cat. Kaye’s face looked pained.)

I struggle to imagine being entertained by this kind of digressive minutiae if set down in prose; but as rhymed by Guriel, the anecdote is a delight.

Guriel gives himself over to flights of lyricism rarely, though his selectivity makes those spells more moving when they do occur (as when we read a scene from the fictional Full-Moon told with the characters as plant-werewolf hybrids):

          As he stood upon the deck, one paw
          Around a clew vine, Campbell scratched his jaw.
          It wanted pruning, being pronged with twigs.
          A shiver ran across his body’s sprigs;
          Above, the moon seemed stamped from light, so full
          He felt it in his flowers, how it’s pull
          Had summoned every petal on his pelt
          To full attention. He could swear he felt
          A few stalks stretching, staining to drink up
         The moonlight…

So much for the verse; what about the universe? This is not only a poem but also a science fiction novel, and Guriel spends much of this book describing a future society in which there is widespread, almost casual use of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and, most spectacularly, an ability to shrink or enlarge any object to almost any degree by manipulating the distance between atoms. Guriel depicts this fabulous technology being deployed in a depressingly plausible way: with poor people (and their appetites) shrunk to the proportion of insects, while the rich modify their own genes for the purposes of an evening’s cosplay.

Very often, the description of a future civilization reflects either a vision of an ennobled human nature, as in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, or a fear that humanity’s baser instincts will increasingly predominate, as in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Guriel refrains from any Eloi-Morlock binary. The inhabitants of his future society are mostly petty, shallow, and self-involved, but not sinister or predatory. His vision is of a future culture neither more nor less enlightened than our own, and his human characters are ordinary people on the inside—neither better nor worse, neither more nor less impressive than our own neighbours and friends.

This realism extends even to what I have called the hero of the book, the fictional Full-Moon. It is hard for writers to refrain from making their heroes extraordinary, but so far as it is possible for Guriel to do so (while preserving tonal harmony between the fictional Full-Moon and Guriel’s main narrative) he fixes the fictional Full-Moon on the same artistic plane as franchises which have become pop culture phenomena in our own age. The book Guriel imagines the future falling in love with is much closer kin to Twilight than Moby-Dick, or even The Hobbit. Some parts of the imaginary Full-Moon are frankly silly—such as the Looney Tunes gag referred to above of a sailing ship being blown along by the huffing and puffing of its own passengers; and Guriel’s depiction of such a book receiving popular worship and obsessive academic scrutiny attributes to future society a silliness all-too familiar in our own day. Yet, as Guriel recognizes, the mediocrity of the Harry Potter series does not invalidate the real love that fans feel for its imagined world—a fandom’s love is an honest expression of the human heart, and Guriel centres that love in his book with a respect which it does not always receive.

This brings us to the third potential categorization of The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles: as a post-modern novel offering metafictional pleasures to accompany the pleasures of science fiction and poetry.

The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles, as a postmodern novel, offers more originality and thematic seriousness than at least I personally expect from the genre. What is the relationship between life and imagination? What is the reality of love for the imaginary? What should technology be for, if not to bring into being what we imagine? The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles provides an extended exploration of these themes, with sobriety and subtlety.

As I said above, it is remarkable how the different aspects of this novel accommodate each other to form the whole: the somewhat impersonal qualities of a post-modern novel are humanized by the manual craftsmanship of the rhyme and meter; the sci-fi world-building lends itself both to entertaining rhymes and an exploration of the broader themes; and the unusually intricate interrogation of imagination and technology validates—even sanctifies—the ingenuity on display in the verse itself, and in the imaginary future explored by Guriel.

There are not a lot of books that are much like The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles, but it did remind me a little of the multimedia novellas of Jon Bois, particularly 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future, which blends sports (itself another kind of pop-culture fandom) with science fiction to explore the meaning of life in a light, humorous tone. The comparison highlights the strengths of The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles—its architectural coherence, granularity of imaginative vision, its poetic energy and intellectual scope—but also its self-imposed limits.

As noted above, the human characters in The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles are the supporting cast, and the fictional Full-Moon is the hero. This is a valid design choice, like building a structure out of stone instead of wood, but such a choice constrains the possibility for human drama and interest. This is a choice and constraint with a long pedigree in speculative fiction: in classics like Childhood’s End and Foundation, neither Arthur C. Clarke nor Isaac Asimov went in much for human characters. Yet, in telling their stories at the level of human society as a whole, they did convey genuine sorrow and heartbreak to their readers, and their works were enriched by that pain.

Now, would it have been artistically valid, for a book that celebrates the kind of love that we call “fandom” to have engaged more frankly with human pain? Is not fandom itself essentially a means of escape from pain and the mundane stakes of human life? I do not want to write nonsense by criticizing a work of art for being the type of artwork it is, but I cannot help wondering whether The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles might not have had just that one more dimension than it did. Guriel is apparently making good headway on his next verse novel, and I will be eager to see what aspects of the universe his work will next explore.

Daniel Cowper is the author of a book of poems, Grotesque Tenderness (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and The God of Doors (winner of the Frog Hollow Press chapbook contest). His next book, Kingdom of the Clock, a verse novel, is forthcoming in April 2025, also with McGill-Queen’s University Press. He lives on a small island off the West Coast of Canada.