18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY january 4-10, 2024 www.montereycountyweekly.com readers he met during a book tour were divers. “They said they couldn’t believe I’m not a diver,” Kraus says. When Kraus started developing the plan for the book, his first concern was setting. “I wanted it to be somewhere in America,” he says. “That, right away, limited me to places where humans and sperm whales can easily interact.” He was not worrying about the genre, and Whalefall fits a lot of categories—general fiction, a thriller, a horror, a mystery. His first inclination was to make it as scientifically accurate as possible. Kraus started studying and talking to whale scientists and diving experts. He learned how to scuba dive in Lake Michigan, “one of the worst places to dive,” he says. “Murky and gloomy.” But he wanted to know how scuba diving equipment felt. The experts he reached out to were excited. It was a new kind of challenge for them, too. Tom Mustill, who wrote the 2022 book How to Speak Whale, mentioned Conner Gallagher. Kraus reached out to see if Gallagher could do the actual dives off Monastery Beach and videotape them for book research. “It was extremely helpful,” Kraus says. “It’s rare a novelist has an inchby-inch record for the visual part of a work.” They emailed back and forth about all sorts of stuff—physical limitations of the diver, time spent carrying a scuba tank. They both were surprised by the growing depth of their relationship. Gallagher grew up in Vermont, the only New England state that doesn’t have access to the Atlantic. Fascinated by the ocean, he studied biology, then moved to Southern California to teach marine science. “That opened my mind to the kelp forest and ecologies and species of the Pacific,” he says. “I started to film everything I could see underwater.” In 2015, Gallagher moved to Monterey. His goal was always combining his love for science and the ocean with the world of media. He succeeded; he works locally and other times is away from home for weeks or months at a time. He read the first draft of Whalefall during an 11-week trip to Antarctica, where he was hired by the BBC and Netflix to film a documentary. He was working on a film project in Monterey when he heard that a Chicago-based author was writing a book about a scuba diver swallowed by a whale. “It was kind of ridiculous, but then I realized he wrote The Shape of Water,” Gallagher says, referring to the 2017 movie by del Toro, a masterful creator of meeting points between human and inhuman, such as Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Like Whalefall, The Shape of Water is a story of deep water and what it hides, and a possibility to connect with it. Gallagher figured that while it’s physically impossible for a diver to be swallowed by a whale, Kraus is an expert when it comes to fantasy that melds with human reality. “I love that kind of stuff so I started to think,” Gallagher says, “OK, if that happened, how would that be possible?” It seems improbable, maybe not as much as being swallowed by a whale, but rare—a writer typing in his place in Chicago and a Monterey diver, united in creating a story that reworks a biblical motif. Just like Jonah, the Whalefall’s main character is being swallowed to be saved—Jonah from a terrible ocean storm sent by God, Jay from his grief. They both will find their way out and become better people. Biblical or not, a diver and the mechanics of the adventure are as important as the biblical source it relies on. Kraus came to Monterey himself, driving all around to see the lay of the land and take videos. He videotaped the exact path Jay takes, parking in secret, going for a risky dive. He passed the Bay School Parent Co-Op Preschool, taking the Carmel Meadows Trailhead through the forest and popping out on North Monastery Beach, the very far end. He looked at warning signs all over—“Danger, intermittent waves of unusual size and force.” Between this video and Gallagher’s videos, he mapped out the first third of the book, with scenery recognizable to anyone familiar with the Carmel-area coast (read an excerpt on p. 18). They worked on the Whalefall project for a couple of years. It took Kraus only five months to write it; the rest was research. Gallagher dove to 100 feet under the surface, and his observations are part of Jay’s fictional world. But let’s go even deeper. There’s the whole emotional level of the story in the novel. It’s not just a diver’s book. There’s a reason why the novel starts with a quote from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. There’s the whole line of male authors’ books about the ocean, the eternal battle of man against a monstrous, wild mother, but also the ultimate Mother, Christian Mary, invoked in ancient times as the Star of the Sea. Being inside of the primordial ocean is like sitting in a mother’s belly. And isn’t sitting inside the whale, undigested, kind of like sitting in a womb? But in Whalefall, the whale symbolizes the father and Jay is sitting inside his belly. After experiencing a horror of survival and emotions related to it, he is being born again—this time by his father and thanks to skills he never appreciated. Jay wants to talk to his dead father; he wants to talk to god. And Kraus believes the ocean is the gigantic force of the planet that is closest to god. You want to see god? Go to the ocean. “He has to stomach the whole thing,” Kraus says, referring to the death of Jay’s father. “When he’s finally out, he’s nourished by the skill set he received from his father.” More skills than he assumed. Accordingly, the whale in the novel is not like the shark in Jaws, Kraus explains. “The whale is not a ‘bad guy,’ just a big, peaceful, benevolent creature,” he says. “If that happened, how would that be possible?” Connor Gallagher presents his equipment on North Monastery Beach in November 2023. Diving off Monastery Beach. This photo by Connor Gallagher captures the moment in between two worlds. Daniel Dreifuss Connor Gallagher
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