Pod (2023)

Why this one?

I had been checking out some books from the 2023 Women’s Prize Longlist, and am now reading through those that I haven’t covered that are on the Shortlist. This is my final read of the six, and - if I’m being brutally honest - the one I was least engaged by as a prospect.

Pod is the work of Laline Paull (active ?2014- ), an English-born child of first generation Indian immigrants. She studied English at Oxford, and then screenwriting in Los Angeles. She began by writing for the stage, before publishing her first novel, The Bees, in 2014. Her debut was nominated for the Women’s Prize in 2015, losing out to Ali Smith’s How to Be Both. She followed this up with 2017’s ‘Cli-Fi’ novel The Ice in 2017.

Thoughts, etc.

Pod is a distinctive novel in that it takes as its focus the lives of a series of marine creatures, notably dolphins. Its primary focus is on Ea, a spinner / ‘Longi’ dolphin who becomes detached from her peaceful and ‘civilised’ pod and finds herself among a boorish, violent pod of bottlenose dolphins, known in the book as Tersiops. Along the way we meet an array of other creatures, all with their own characteristics, including a wise old whale, a gender-switching Wrasse, giant clams and a fugu or two. Memorably, there’s also the captive bottlenose dolphin Google, who has been enslaved by humans (or ‘Anthrops’ in the novel’s parlance) for horrifying military purposes.

I didn’t come into this with massively high expectations, as it’s somewhat outside my normal comfort zone and into the realms of fantasy. I’ve certainly been pleasantly surprised before by books I’ve been similarly apprehensive about, though, so came to it with as open a mind as I could. My reading journey was somewhat up and down, if I’m honest, and I’ve come out the other end still not being entirely sure what I made of it.

Where it definitely succeeds is in believably bringing to life these non-human protagonists. While their conditions and behaviours are all based on rigorously researched science, their inner worlds are, of course, a work of fantasy, but it’s a very believable fantasy. What I suppose I wrestled with a little more was why I should care - the majority of the characters are pretty hard to like or (for me) to even take much of an interest in. There are exceptions: the story of Google is genuinely eye-opening and I feel like a book more clearly focused on his experiences and the use of dolphins by the military would have engaged me a lot more. The parasitic Remora is an occasional beacon of light relief, too. And there is something in the child/parent dynamics of both Ea and the bottlenose Chit that evokes sympathy.

Elsewhere, I found the characters to be relatively hard to distinguish from one another, and in the case of the Tersiops pod, pretty tediously abhorrent. Yes, they’re not humans so should we graft human morals onto their relentless sexual violence against the females of their species… but ALSO what really is the point (in the context of what the novel seems to be trying to do elsewhere) in dwelling quite so obsessively on how horrible the majority of these creatures are. OK, so there’s a cursory sentence towards the end blaming anthrop pollution / climate change on the bad behaviour of the Tersiops, and that’s obviously implied throughout but in general it had the opposite effect on me to the presumably intended goal of increasing sympathy for non-human life.

Bouncing back again, the point above aside its key strength is probably in bringing awareness to the destruction we are wreaking on the marine ecosystem. Indiscrimate overfishing, oil spills and other pollutants, swathes of plastic littering the seas, and human appropriation of dolphins for both entertainment and those aforementioned disturbing military usages are all comprehensively depicted from the perspective of the largely uncomprehending marine population. It’s clearly all grounded in the horrible reality that we all participate in, and is absolutely a thought-provoking read (as a pescatarian who often struggles to justify the pesca side of things, it hit quite hard in some places). I do slightly wonder if it’s doomed to be read primarily by people who already know all of this stuff though - as Paull notes in her acknowledgement there are documentaries aplenty out there that have covered this subject.

To really reach out beyond that audience who are already singing from the same hymnsheet, the storytelling needs to be so captivating that it engages on its own merit, regardless of its important environmental points. I guess this is what Paull is aiming for with the internecine fighting among the dolphins and the love story. The trouble was, I found the former tediously complex (it probably wasn’t, but I was bored and kept skipping over the fights over who was the next Lord Dolphin or whatever - like an undersea Game of Thrones which I also could not care less about) and the latter unconvincing and reduced at the end to a bunch of characters repeating the word LOVE at each other like Instagram-friendly fridge magnets.

Pod is ultimately a book that frustrated me. There’s a lot of skill and hard research on display here, some of which is very effectively deployed. But in general I feel that it’s a book that does relatively little to further the hugely important causes it showcases. Others clearly disagree, which is fair enough, but I feel that if this book were to triumph it would be for perceived worthiness of purpose rather than strength of storytelling, which to me would be a shame.

Score

5

I wanted to get on board with this, despite my initial doubts. But ultimately it didn’t convince and is by some distance my least favourite of the six shortlisted books.

Summary: Women’s Prize 2023 Shortlist

Here’s how I rated the six contenders for this year’s Prize. I’d be happy with any one of the first five winning, to be honest!

1. Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver (9.5)

2. Black Butterflies - Priscilla Morris (9)

3. The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O’Farrell (9)

4. Fire Rush - Jacqueline Crooks (8.5)

5. Trespasses - Louise Kennedy (8.5)

6. Pod - Laline Paull (5)

I read three other books from the longlist, out of which I’d have been happiest to see Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan (8.5) dislodge Pod.

Next up

Probably heading back to my Women’s Prize winners read-through, which is up to the mid-2010s. But possibly with a brief diversion first…