Кристофер Мур: Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

After reverently lambasting the most cherished rites and credos of virtually every one of the world s major religions in his transcendently hilarious novel Lamb, the one and only Christopher Moore returns with a wild look at interspecies communication, adventure on the high seas, and an eons-old mystery.

Marine behavioral biologist Nate Quinn is in love — with the salt air and sun-drenched waters off Maui… and especially with the majestic ocean-dwelling behemoths that have been bleeping and hooting their haunting music for more than twenty million years. But just why do the humpback whales sing? That s the question that has Nate and his crew poking, charting, recording, and photographing any large marine mammal that crosses their path. Until the extraordinary day when a whale lifts its tail into the air to display a cryptic message spelled out in foot-high letters: Bite me.

No one on Nate s team has ever seen such a thing, not his longtime partner, photographer Clay Demodocus, not their saucy young research assistant, Amy. Not even spliff-puffing white-boy Rastaman, Kona (the former Preston Applebaum of New Jersey), could boast such a sighting in one of his dope-induced hallucinations. And when a roll of film returns from the lab missing the crucial tail shot — and their research facility is summarily trashed — Nate realizes that something very fishy indeed is going on.

This, apparently, is big, involving dangerously interested other parties — competitive researchers, the cutthroat tourist industry, perhaps even the military. The weirdness only gets weirder when a call comes in from Nate s big-bucks benefactor saying that a whale has made contact — by phone. And it s asking for a hot pastrami and Swiss on rye. Suddenly the answer to the question that has daunted and driven Nate throughout his adult life is within his reach. But it s waiting for him in the form of an amazing adventure beneath the waves, 623 feet down, somewhere off the coast of Chile. And it s not what anyone would think.

It must be said: Christopher Moore s Fluke is a whale of a novel.