Through the Darkening Sea by Claire Saxby

In Through the Darkening Sea, award-winning Australian author Claire Saxby tells an enchanting, lyrical story about a whale who dies and sinks to the bottom of the sea.

The story starts poetically with: ‘Out in the open ocean, where currents sway as wild as wind, where sharks and sea lions widely roam, a whale falls.’

As it sinks gently, like poetry in motion, it becomes surrounded by a host of wild and wonderful creatures who live deep below the surface: See-through worms explode bioluminescent bombs, dumbo octopuses with headset fins shapeshift, and silvery lightfish, fine-toothed anglerfish, ratfish, snow crabs, brittle stars and slime hags all gather to have a veritable feast as the whale’s body comes to rest on the sea floor. As nourishing food is scarce in the depths of the sea this is a wonderful opportunity.

Seasons will come and go before they have finished feeding on its enormous fleshly carcass. Then worms will come, burrow into its bones and feed on its skeleton until finally the whale is completely gone.

She could have finished the story there, but Claire Saxby also wanted to show the cycle of life and that as one whale dies, another will take its place. A full-bellied whale now appears, drifts on the star-scattered sea and feeds on the krill which have returned to the surface at night, before she travels on to warm tropical waters to give birth to her calf.

In his illustrations, Peter Cheong beautifully evokes the mystical atmosphere of this underwater kingdom and shows how the colour of the sea gradually darkens, from a deep blue to ink-black, as the dead whale sinks through diverse levels until it reaches the bottom of the ocean. His illustrations of the strange creatures who live there are not photorealistic. But each is clearly recognisable in his collage-style artworks.

Teachers may well want to challenge their students to use their imagination to create a wild and wonderful deep-sea creature of their own in Peter Cheong’s style. And it could well be that such creatures exist. There are thousands upon thousands yet to be discovered, as the deep sea is the largest and least understood habitat on earth.

I would especially recommend this book for upper Primary school and Intermediate school students. I think Through the Darkening Sea would be an excellent starting point for further investigation into how the characteristics of the ocean change as one travels deeper through its layers, and how sea creatures have adapted their shapes and forms to help them to survive in this challenging habitat e.g. why so many of them are red, and why many are bioluminescent. To help them with this, it would have been useful if, at the end of the book,, there had been some brief scientific facts.

Through the Darkening Sea is a beautiful book that is bound to awaken their sense of wonder and curiosity about the creatures who inhabit this vast underground watery world and its astounding biodiversity.

Reviewer: Lyn Potter

HarperCollins