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The Whale Road, D.K. McCutchen
Vintage
Reviewed by Lindsay Wright (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

There's a great story in this book – it just has trouble getting out through the writing. The plot loosely follows a group of whale researchers aboard the 12.3m yacht Cachalot as they sail from Tahiti to New Zealand tracking whales all the while.

The text flip-flops from landfall to landfall without really engaging the reader in the voyage or the people undertaking it. A New Zealand crewman is simply referred to as "the Kiwi", the skipper is "the Captain" and his wife "CW" ... none of whom the author develops enough to become real characters.

The narrative tacks back and forth between first person and reported speech, which can be a bit exasperating, but at no stage does it evoke the reality of life with a bunch of diverse people in a small boat at sea.

There are bright and interesting spots in the narrative, interesting encounters with the odd whale and cetacean facts and figures, if you're interested in that sort of thing, but there's also a lot of extraneous writing to wade through to get to them.

According to the publisher's blurb, The Whale Road is "imbued with magic realism and contains strong messages about whale hunting, ecological damage and the abuse of island environments and communities. It also echoes the author's life." The realism and the messages are both hard to find ... as is the real story.

The author, Deborah McCutchen, is married to a New Zealander and teaches creative writing in Massachusetts, on the east coast of her native USA.