This intriguing adventure is billed as a retelling of Melville’s classic – with a catch. It’s told from the whale’s point of view. This is an original but difficult premise to work with and has every potential of being a fine epic tragedy. In many ways, Alison Baird comes maddeningly close.

We’re introduced to White as the Waves (Moby Dick) in the womb and follow him through every stage of his long, almost unendurably sad life. Baird meticulously creates a compelling universe in the oceans. Several interacting marine civilizations, complete with their own spellbinding mythologies and cultures, are portrayed struggling with the murderous world of the whalers. Although we come to care about the white whale’s quirky friends, including Moontail, the love of his life, they are on stage too briefly. Much of our hero’s life is spent in solitary introspection, depression, or deadly rage battling the whaling ships and hunting down his nemesis, Captain Ahab.

With excruciating thoroughness (and herein lies the maddening part), we enter a world as fully realized as the warrens in Richard Adams’ Watership Down. Baird’s passion for her subject matter rings through every line. The problem is that, at 276 pages, there are too many lines with an instructional rather than storytelling tone. Time and again the reader faces intrusive explanations featuring correct but clunky terminology such as spiracle, vestibular sac, and spermaceti oil. This is particularly jarring set against the rawness of the appalling carnage and horror suffered by the whales. Perhaps the tale should have steeped a while longer. As it is, White as the Waves left me with the uneasy feeling that there’s a story somewhere in this lesson.