This book is about a whale: reflections on Evenings & Weekends

At first, you may think this novel about sifting through the mess of contemporary life, uncovering the strange depths between everyday people in a way that is hilariously relatable. You may think it's about following a tangle of characters as they navigate a sweltering London summer, where every tiny piece of drama feels on the verge of boiling over. You may think it's slice-of-life piece about the slow unraveling of personal and social facades. You may think it's about characters who overthink everything, who can't act before trying to predict the rest of the world's reactions to their actions, who can't shut off their internal monologues that narrate their life from afar, who can't live in the moment, and who are mired in shame, trauma, internalized homophobia, heartbreak, bills, jealousy, drugs, disease, alienation, nihilism, anxiety about global capitalism, and a heat wave so massive that it's hard to think straight about anything other than sweat.

You wouldn't be wrong, but this book is also about a whale.

The whale, inspired by a northern bottlenose nicknamed Willy who died in London in 2006, is perhaps the most iconic and darkly comical part of the story. The very first line opens with a whale that gets stuck in the shallow waters of the Thames, serving as a symbol for the things that change as a result of humanity's impact on the climate, the things that are pushed into places where they don't belong, the things that boil closer to the surface than they should throughout the story, the things that probably shouldn't have been buried in the first place, and a million other relevant topics that the novel dives into.

In short, the whale is everything.

When it's first spotted in the Thames, every character reacts to the whale differently. Some characters worry about it. Some characters argue about it. Some characters think seeing a whale in the Thames means they're going insane. The whale is thus used as a device to teach readers about the different characters in the story. It transforms into more of a tool than a real creature. This transformation reveals itself as a kind of commentary on how modernity alienates everyone from reality. The whale isn't truly there, not in any meaningful sense that matters to the characters or readers. It ceases to exist as a tangible creature, becoming instead a collection of mediated representations and cultural responses that cause it to recede deep into abstraction. In short, there's just discourse about the whale. There is very rarely an actual whale. The discourse, to some degree, becomes muddier and more alienating to humans than the water of the Thames is to the whale.

Hundreds, then thousands, posted their take. They're nothing short of identical. They're literal opposites. The marine biologist does not, in fact, look like Princess Diana, and instead, looks like Lady Gaga, or Marine Le Pen, or, most bizarrely, Saint Hildegard of Bingen. A new subgenre of conspiracy theory emerges: Diana never died. She has been living the humble life of a marine biologist this entire time. First claimed ironically, then sincerely, then an impossible-to-interpret blend of the two. It's not just that she looks like Princess Diana, say the theorists: she speaks like her too. She says, 'Well, the Thames isn't very deep for a whale of this size', with the exact same intonation that Princess Diana said 'Well, there were three of us in this marriage' in her famous 1993 interview with the journalist Martin Bashir. All over London, people re-watch the interview and are struck by Diana's magnetism. A gay icon, they say, a fashion icon, an icon of the twentieth century, Diana, Princess of Wales, we love you. Then: the pun, held back at first, but it can't be helped: Diana, Princess of Whales, posted by dozens, hundreds, thousands within the hour, each claiming to have been the phrase's true creator, and proclaiming all instances in which it is uttered uncredited to be flagrant violations of intellectual property. Then: the perfunctory debate on the digital commons -- everyone has been here before, the old points rehashed -- and Maggie wonders: does she truly believe that Diana, Princess of Wales, and Diana, Princess of Whales are all that alike? But then, this is beside the point. The point is that it's funny to say that she does.

Oisín McKenna, Evenings & Weekends

The rest of the narrative is about characters forced to navigate a world buried under layers of discourse. The protagonists are all overthinkers. They're thinking about how to turn simple interactions into social media posts. They're narrating their own life without fully living it. They're trying to predict everyone's potential responses to their actions, so when they do finally act, they alter what they say and do to control the fallout, exposing how they're already reacting to the anticipated reaction that they made up in their heads. The world is recursive. It's reactions and discourse all the way down. The constant precognitive thinking that results from existing under these conditions leaves them mentally paralyzed. It limits what they say to their friends. It limits when and how they say it. They're scared of delivering big or sad news. They're socially anxious. They can't communicate. They're nihilistic, even as they crave meaning.

The whale represents all these complicated feelings in a recursive world, but it goes even deeper. We need to talk about global warming. Humanity's impact on animal migration patterns is probably how the whale got lost in the first place, but the planet's slow destruction plays an even larger role in the story. The novel integrates environmental degradation as an assumed condition of existence, weaving global warming seamlessly into the narrative. Climate change is not a foreign threat. It's the kind of threat that's so familiar and normalized that you can almost forget about it, even as it influences everyone's material realities. (It makes you wonder what other problematic realities we are training ourselves to ignore -- like capitalism, bigotry, or the plight of a lost whale.)

To be clear, though it is explicitly set during a massive heat wave, the book isn't directly about climate apocalypse. It doesn't position itself as climate fiction. However, while the inner struggles of the characters takes center stage in the story, there are enough environmental references to remind us that the boundary between internal and external is perhaps an artificial one.

The text's preoccupation with challenging the dichotomy between external and internal also manifests in its treatment of illness and bodily experience. One character develops asthma from living in moldy substandard housing. His father develops cancer from asbestos exposure. In other words, the exterior and interior are folded into one another. They're not disconnected. (Pregnancy functions similarly in the novel, representing an internal development with both external causes and external implications.)

Outside of physical ailments, there are also hidden internal secrets and emotions that play a role in the story. Everyone is trying to separate their internal lives from their external ones, mostly without success. (These patterns of concealment are symptomatic of the broader communication difficulties mentioned earlier in reference to precognitive thinking.) The narratives explores social facades. It explores uniforms, both literal and figurative. It explores superficial professional discourse that masquerades as profundity. It explores being closeted. It explores how everyone has hidden depths. Various characters engage with literal depth by digging through the soil for worms or by taking a geological interest in London's underground clay layers.

The concept of hidden depths also acquires sexual connotations that connect to broader questions around queerness. Anal sex is explicitly described as deep. One character (who is not queer) also associates the ocean's unknowable depths and fluid boundaries with queerness. The narrative then complicates this association by introducing characters who like to find depth in surface phenomena like birds and trees (in addition to underground or underwater locations like the ocean).

Of course, we can't talk about the ocean without, once again, mentioning the whale. Its predicament in shallow river waters serves as the culminating symbol for these themes around depth and secrets. Its alienation from surface society also mirrors the social estrangement experienced by the novel's queer and marginalized characters, though the parallel remains imperfect, because unlike a displaced person, the whale cannot ever be expected to adapt to conditions on land. Its displacement nevertheless reinforces the text's broader examination of characters forced into new and alienating contexts. There are queer characters acting straight. There are straight characters acting queer. There are Irish characters acting English. There are working class characters acting wealthy. There are suburbanite characters acting cosmopolitan. Everyone is out of place. Everyone is being forced to adapt.

The hope is that the whale returns to the sea, but where do the marginalized humans get to go? Should they be sent away to form communities detached from the rest of mainstream society? Is the boundary between mainstream and marginalized just as porous as the one between ocean and river? I think we all probably have our own answers to these questions, but I don't want to focus on the whale as a symbol anymore. I don't' want to treat it as an object that is there solely to teach me something about concepts that exist outside itself. I just want to sit and empathize with the whale on its own terms, and I'm devastated by the practical impossibility of this task -- because this creature isn't even real. It's from a work of fiction. It's an abstract symbol in my head. There's no amount of empathizing I can do that won't be on my own personal terms.

But fiction is powerful. It is perhaps the most powerful thing we have. Society is built on fiction. Practical impossibility need not stop me from simply thinking and doing. I don't have to be like the characters in the book, overthinking everything, derailing myself from doing what I truly want to do, which is to simply meditate on the whale. I said it earlier, and I'll say it again: The whale is everything.